children
new cat 5/16
see child labor
merri ok
see moral pANIC
SEE pink pill
see they aRE COMING FOR YOUR KIDS groomer pedo
see KID KILLERS
neglected, aha all bad news of many types, not exactly target but ...
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study-finds-over-33-million-instagram-tiktok-posts-promoting-harmful-content-to-kids
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an 4 23 no lnx
Missouri Republican defends letting adults marry 12-year-old kids
Brad Reedand Raw Story April 12, 2023
Missouri State Sen. Mike Moon (R) this week defended the rights of parents to marry off children as young as 12 years old.
The Springfield News-Leader reports that Moon made the remarks during a contentious debate over banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors in which Democratic State Rep. Peter Meredith accused him of hypocrisy for supporting the bill despite positioning himself as a champion of parents' rights.
"I've heard you talk about parents' rights to raise their kids how they want," argued Meredith. "In fact, I just double-checked, you voted no on making it illegal for kids to be married to adults at the age of 12 if their parents consented to it!"
Meredith went on to accuse Moon of making it legal for a 12-year-old to be "raped by an adult" as long as their parents agreed to let it occur, which prompted an angry response from Moon.
"Do you know any kids who have been married at age 12?" he asked Meredith. "I do. And guess what? They're still married."
As the News-Leader notes, "Moon's support of child marriage in some instances has been long documented," as in the past he has discussed "a couple he met in college who had married one another at age 12."
Watch the video below or at this link.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
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West Virginia Republicans vote to keep child marriage legal ›
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an 4 23
Republican supermajority in the North Dakota State Senate recently approved a measure boosting their meal stipends just days after they rejected funding for providing free school meals to poor students, Heartland Signal reported on Tuesday.
GOP lawmakers "passed Senate Bill 2124, which raises the amount of money state senators and their staff can receive from meal reimbursements. Just days prior, the same body voted down House Bill 1491 23-24, a bill that would cover lunch for school children whose parents’ income falls 200% below the poverty line," according to the outlet.
Social media exploded with outrage and disgust.
Sonny J Lewis: "Zilch for the kids but up to $55/day if I'm reading the law right. They should be more than ashamed of themselves."
Linda Hillemann: "Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Oh, and anyone who knows these people should remind them of Jesus’ story about the rich man and poor Lazarus. (Luke 16: 19-31) It doesn't end well for the rich guy. Or in this case, legislators who steal from children."
badger person: "Pick 50 of those students at random and they'd do a better job running the state."
Elon Sucks: "The cruelty is the point."
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/manchin-2657367957/
kid poverty up ( b/c end of tax credit?)
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an 5 22
Republicans just voted against two bills to ease the baby formula shortage they have spent weeks falsely trying to pin on President Joe Biden.
In tweets and in floor speeches, Republicans have been attacking President Biden for the nationwide baby formula shortage caused by one manufacturer’s recall and closure of its plant for bacterial infection after two infants died.The shortage has been exacerbated by a trade agreement signed by then-President Donald Trump that makes it extremely difficult and expensive to import formula from other countries, and the fact that 90 percent of baby formula in the U.S. is manufactured by just four companies. Also, hoarding, and price-gouging.
Last week President Biden sat down with manufacturers and retailers to map out a plan to get more formula onto store shelves immediately and directed the Food and Drug Administration to help get the plant reopened. This week he went two steps further: he invoked the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula and produce it ahead of other products and created a program to use federal planes to import baby formula from other countries.
House Democrats last week also opened an investigation into the baby formula shortage.
On Wednesday the House voted on two emergency bills to further ease the shortage.
One example of Republicans falsely attacking President Biden and the left is House GOP Caucus chair Elise Stefanik‘s now-infamous tweet accusing Democrats of having “no plan” as she labeled them “pedo grifters.”...
one bill would give FDA $28 million to add staff, work to help get more formula to consumers, and create a long-term strategy, including increased safety inspections so this cannot happen again. The second would dramatically increase supply from foreign sources to consumers using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program.
192 House Republicans voted against giving FDA $28 million to help fix the crisis and ensure it does not happen again.
Nine House Republicans voted against making it easier for WIC customers to get access to baby formula.
Many Americans are becoming outraged as the news from last night’s votes is spreading online.
[Here’s the list of 9 members of Congress (all Republicans)who voted NO:
Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Gaetz Louie Gohmert Lauren Boebert Paul Gosar Thomas Massie Andy Biggs Clay Higgins Chip Roy.]
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/sanders-manchin/
41% spike in child poverty , slammed by Bernie
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can't make it up, you da thunk the wd have learned from prev ridicule? BigBird sacred? vaxx
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/ted-cruz-2655516694/
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what happened to gop as protectors of innocent (well, unborn) kids?
abbott and desantis called out by biden
mengele
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/texas-public-schools/
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msnbc moral panic: you raise kids w/ right values/american and univ makes them into liberals[and/or gay?]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/
Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys
Raw Story June 23, 2021
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.
Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.
Well, this is thoroughly Orwellian. ?? Faculty and students of Florida, you know what to do! Freep Mini-Trump's stup… https://t.co/N2nEE5UzuM
— Betty Cracker ?? (@Betty Cracker ??)1624454881.0
Well that's got to be unconstitutional: Florida students required to register political views with the state to pro… https://t.co/b1Bh8p98uN
— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1624455537.0
DeSantis wants to survey university students and staff, with the threat of budget cuts if he doesn't get his way???… https://t.co/IWfcM8nGhI
— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@Witty Librarian In a Mask)1624455089.0...
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aha 421 tucker says mask is child abuse, recall kid abuse was big draw gateway drug for women into qanon and then this:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/bachmann-michelle/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7051&rs=182
ncrm
Televangelist Kenneth Copeland's The Victory Channel aired a special edition of its "Victory News" program Wednesday night to coincide with President Joe Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress.
Former congresswoman Michele Bachmann was among the commentators who appeared on the program, and she was predictably unimpressed by Biden's speech, calling it "cruel," labeling Biden a fake president, and saying that the entire thing smacked of "the invasion of the zombie apocalypse."
"This is a fake State of the Union speech," Bachmann said before Biden delivered his remarks. "What we're watching is a coup. It's my opinion that the election was irregular, we didn't have a true election result. We had a fake election. We've had a fake presidency. This is a fake State of the Union address."
"With all due respect, it was the invasion of the zombie apocalypse, as far as I'm concerned," Bachmann declared after Biden had completed his speech. "It was probably one of the most sad, depressing speeches I've ever heard."
"Quite honestly, the word that I have for his speech: It's cruel," she added. "What he's intending for the American people, the result is cruel. … I think one of the most cruel aspects of what he's proposing is snatching 3-and-4-year-olds out of their parents' arms, putting them in government-run preschools [where] they'll be learning critical race theory. I've observed this curriculum. I've seen this curriculum that they're planning to use with little 3-and-4-year-olds. It is the LGBTQ curriculum. It is the critical race theory. Our little children will be indoctrinated before they even get to kindergarten."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/president-trump-is-the-child-trafficker-in-chief/
President Donald Trump thinks of himself as a champion against human trafficking. He addressed a White House Summit on the issue in January claiming there was a “humanitarian crisis” at the border fomented by criminal organizations and that “traffickers victimize countless women and children.” He signed an executive order and diverted $400 million in funding to combat the issue, boasting in his usual manner that “we have signed more legislation on human trafficking than any other administration has ever even thought about.” But in recent months, the administration has been found to be flouting the United States’ own anti-trafficking laws by deporting thousands of children and families seeking asylum, practically delivering them into the hands of traffickers across the border in Mexico.
Dr. Amy Cohen, executive director of Every Last One, explained to me in an interview that under the Trump administration’s so-called “Remain in Mexico” program, “the United States has been essentially feeding vulnerable migrant children and families to cartel traffickers in Mexico continuously.” The program, officially known by the Orwellian-sounding title of “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), sends immigrants seeking entry into the United States across the border to Mexico to await the adjudication of their cases. While the Department of Homeland Security claimed that MPP would “decrease the… ability of smugglers and traffickers to prey on vulnerable populations,” in fact it does the opposite.
Cohen elaborated on this horrific phenomenon, saying, “migrants are dropped off with nothing on the other side of the border, with no shelter, with no protection, with no food, with no money. And within minutes, they are picked up by cartel gangs that are waiting.” As a child and family psychiatrist who works closely with traumatized migrant children, she did not mince words, saying that families are, “kidnapped and used for extortion, which is a form of trafficking. Sometimes they are tortured. Sometimes they are raped. Children are compelled to watch. Sometimes children themselves are raped.”
The only way to view the outcome of this policy is that the United States is actively participating in a trafficking operation. The Trump administration cannot claim ignorance of the outcome of MPP. According to Cohen, “This is happening in cities literally all along the border. This is not a secret; this is widespread.” So extensive is the abuse that according to her, “The vast majority of asylum seekers who we’ve placed into the MPP program have at one time or another experienced at least one, sometimes multiple, episodes of what I would consider trafficking, of kidnapping, and some form of psychological or physical torture."
because of the extreme danger that the Trump administration has put families in, according to Cohen it has “forced many parents into a decision” about whether to keep their children with them or send them unaccompanied across the U.S. border.
But under cover of the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government has accelerated the expulsion of even unaccompanied children to Mexico and Central America—in violation of federal law. The Associated Press explained that “More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since March under an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws.”
Now reports have emerged of the government hiring a private security and transportation firm to move immigrant families and children into hotels in the United States before expelling them. According to the New York Times, which broke the story, the Trump administration has created “a largely unregulated shadow system of detention and swift expulsions without the safeguards that are intended to protect the most vulnerable migrants.” Children, some as young as one year old, are being cared for in hotels like Best Western and Hampton Inn by private security personnel who have no childcare training.
Cohen says advocates like her believe that “this has been a way for the United States to try to hide a number of these children who they are deporting.” Those children held in government facilities have to be registered as having entered the United States, which then triggers legal protections for them. But by holding children in hotels, effectively off the books and out of public view, “government attorneys are denying that they are actually in the custody” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, says Cohen. Bizarrely, they are claiming that the children are in the custody of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over concerns of COVID-19, and thereby flouting the legal mandate known as the Flores Settlement to maintain the safety, care, and oversight of the children.
Where the children end up once they are removed from the U.S. is not known, and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency will not say. According to Reuters, “Between April and June, U.S. officials arrested more than 3,300 unaccompanied children on the southwest border, but CBP has declined to say how many have been expelled under the new process or give a breakdown of arrests by nationality for that time period.” During that same time frame, out of the thousands of children apprehended, only about 160 remain in U.S. custody.
It is ironic, to say the least, that some of Trump’s most loyal followers are conspiracy theorists who label themselves QAnon claiming that the president is facing off against a “cabal of Democratic pedophiles.” So mainstream is this movement that one of its followers just won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia. QAnon is now appropriating the social media hashtag #SaveTheChildren and promoting fantastical claims of a widespread child sex trafficking ring. Its followers have even joined the anti-trafficking movement in the United States. But they have entirely ignored the very real trafficking and exploitation of children at the U.S. border that their president has unleashed.
More than two years ago, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed that the government cared about children when he officially announced Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, saying, “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” It was a thinly veiled attempt to punish those fleeing poverty and violence for a better life in America. And while mass public outrage forced Trump to back off (he signed an executive order in June 2018 to end what his own discretionary policy initiated), in truth the torture and trauma facing immigrant families did not end. It was simply moved out of our view across the border into even more dangerous conditions.
As America hurtles toward November 3 with a desperation unlike any we’ve felt for previous presidential elections, the issue of how President Trump has treated immigrant families and children has been largely off the radar. But if we care about children and about protecting them from horrific torture and abuse, Trump’s role as Child-Trafficker-in-Chief ought to be central to our election discourse.
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1219 uganda floods, drought, hunger, DN, guk child brides are flipside of soldier? aha like gig economy, convert kid to commodity, liability to asset?!
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/punishing-the-poor-for-being-hungry/
no lnx
Punishing the poor for being hungry
Written by David K. Shipler / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019
The United States might be the only country in the world where poverty is considered a moral failing—on the part of the victims, not the society. When conservatives are in charge of government, this judgment infiltrates policy. Republicans move repeatedly to twist regulations around an assumption that the poor don’t want to work and don’t make sound decisions. And when this bias affects children’s nutrition, it can cause lifelong impairment.
In the last year alone, the Trump administration has taken multiple shots at food stamps, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which helped feed about 40 million people last year. The latest change, one week ago, would cut benefits by $4.5 billion over five years. Even in a booming economy, one in seven households with children were considered “food insecure” last year, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2018 survey, meaning that they weren’t sure of having enough food for everyone.
Research in the rapidly advancing field of neuroscience has documented the severe biological assaults caused by inadequate nutrition during sensitive phases of brain development. Numerous studies, compiled in a lengthy National Academy of Sciences report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, portray a devastating landscape of cognitive deficiency resulting from nutritional deprivation. The insufficiency of healthy food during a pregnant woman’s second trimester can reduce the creation of neurons, the brain’s impulse-conducting cells. Malnutrition in the third trimester restricts their maturation and retards the production of branched cells called glia.
Iron is essential to promote the growth of the brain in size and the creation of the nerve-transmitting myelin sheath around the brain’s nerve fibers. The impact of iron deficiency in a baby, therefore, never disappears, even once the deficiency is eliminated. One longitudinal studythat followed children from infancy through adolescence found that they scored lower “in arithmetic achievement and written expression, motor functioning, and some specific cognitive processes such as spatial memory and selective recall.”
Teachers reported that such children displayed “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems.” It is no great leap of logic to see learning disabilities as one result of malnutrition. And a child who can’t do decently in school, who can’t follow half of what a teacher is saying, is more inclined to drop out.
For those Republicans who are moved more by self-interest than empathy, it’s worth noting that high school dropouts earn less that those with degrees, pay less in taxes, have more serious medical problems, and are at higher risk of ending up in jail.
Yet Trump’s people have sought to saddle the $68 billion-a-year SNAP program with restrictions and cuts to the monthly benefits, which now come on debit cards with declining balances, and typically last a family only two or three weeks. Certain regulations that the Trump administration has either enacted or has openly considered would treat needy Americans with suspicion and distrust. For instance:
Officials have considered imposing a drug-testing regime on SNAP recipients (although not on farmers who receive huge federal subsidies as part of the same legislation).
The Agriculture Department, which administers the program, published a rule in July to eliminate states’ option to raise eligibility limits above the federal ceiling, which is 130 percent of the poverty line.
Previously, states could get waivers to enroll families earning more if their housing and child-care expenses soaked up a big percentage of their income. More generous housing subsidies would help, because in many parts of the country, where rent can consume 50 percent or more of a family’s budget, the money for food gets squeezed. The comment period on the rule change ended in September; once adopted, it will cut off about 3 million recipients.
In last week’s action, the administration effectively took away $75 in benefits from one out of every five families by recalculating how housing and utilities costs are figured.
The Trump administration tried to tighten work requirements in this year’s budget, Congress refused, and officials have gone ahead anyway to partially evade the legislative intent. Since 1996, single able-bodied adults with no dependents, up to age 49, could get SNAP benefits for only three months in a three-year period unless they worked or were in job training at least 80 hours a month. States could waive the rule in areas with acute joblessness. Trump wanted to expand the requirement to age 59 and, more harmfully, apply it to those with children over six years old. That was rejected by Republicans and Democrats in Congress. So last December the Agriculture Department did what it could administratively by making it much harder for states to get waivers.
In his 2019 budget, Trump proposed replacing half of a family’s cash grants with a food package of cereal, pasta, peanut butter, canned fruit and vegetables, meat, poultry, and other items deemed good for them. Sending such packages to 40 million people would have been so costly and impractical that the idea collapsed of its own weight. But the notion seemed borne of a patronizing attitude toward the poor, who suffer from a disparaging stereotype that they do not act responsibly.
Clinics treating childhood malnutrition see a broad array of causes. Lack of money is the centerpiece, but lack of knowledge about healthy eating can also contribute to some cases. Health providers find that some parents don’t know how to cook with relatively inexpensive ingredients. New immigrants unfamiliar with American food can be fooled by ads into thinking that Coke and Cheetos are healthy. So can Americans themselves. Lots of junk food is cheap and filling, hence the nation’s epidemic of obesity, which can be a sign of malnutrition.
Supermarkets with fresh, healthy food are scarce in many low-income neighborhoods. A child’s food allergies can be baffling without the funds and information required to have a large assortment of choices on hand. Single parents doing shift work can’t keep track of what their kids are being fed by multiple caregivers. Nor do they usually have the orderly life that allows them to sit children down calmly to feed them, or have a regular family meal.
In other words, childhood malnutrition is created at the confluence of problems and disabilities that magnify and reinforce one another. They must all be addressed. The cognitive impairment that results cannot be attacked by a country that keeps electing officials who entangle the safety net in a set of punitive impulses.
David K. Shipler is a Washington Monthly contributing writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven books, and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He blogs at The Shipler Report.
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Opportunity to strike': Inside kids' health office shake-up
:{:{}:
Internal emails and personnel records obtained by E&E News shed light on the ouster of Ruth Etzel from EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection. They detail the investigation of the health office chief as well as the campaign by the agency's press office to push back as her departure gained national attention.
By Kevin Bogardus and Ariel Wittenberg in Greenwire Thursday, August 29, 2019
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also lead in NJ
NJ school district debates whether or not to feed kids who owe more than $20 in school lunch ‘debt’
Another day, another school debating whether or not to punish hungry kids because they can’t afford to pay for their lunches. Today’s horror brings us to New Jersey.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/border-patrol-decried-for-trying-to-kidnap-us-citizen-kids-and-use-them-as-hostages-catch-and-deport-their-parents/
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no lnx dox
Alexa, stop spying on my kids’: FTC complaint charges Amazon’s Echo Dot violates privacy law
‘Alexa, stop spying on my kids’: FTC complaint charges Amazon’s Echo Dot violates privacy law Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1127033597 BARCELONA - JULY 2018: Amazon Echo Smart Home Alexa Voice Service in a living room on July 20, 2018 in Barcelona.
written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams May 10, 2019
5
"Amazon markets Echo Dot Kids as a device to educate and entertain kids, but the real purpose is to amass a treasure trove of sensitive data that it refuses to relinquish even when directed to by parents."
A coalition of consumer and public health groups demanded Thursday that federal regulators investigate and sanction Amazon for its Echo Dot Kids Edition, arguing that the device illegally collects and retains children’s personal data.
The brightly colored, always-on listening device “will play music, answer questions, read stories, tell jokes, and more—all with younger ears in mind,” according to Amazon. “The included one year of FreeTime Unlimited gives your kids access to thousands of hours of fun and educational content, including ad-free radio stations and playlists, Audible books, and a growing list of premium kids skills.”
Amazon maintained in statements to reporters on Thursday that Echo Dot Kids Edition and FreeTime comply with federal privacy rules—but 19 groups, led by Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), disagree.
In a complaint submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Thursday, the coalition charged that the device violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), based on the findings of an investigation conducted by CCFC and the Institute for Public Representation (IPR) at Georgetown Law.
“We spent months analyzing the Echo Dot Kids and the device’s myriad privacy policies and we still don’t have a clear picture of what data is collected by Amazon and who has access to it,” Angela Campbell, a CCFC board member and director of IPR’s Communications and Technology Clinic, said in a statement.
“If privacy experts can’t make heads or tails of Amazon’s privacy policy labyrinth,” Campbell asked, “how can a parent meaningfully consent to the collection of their children’s data?”
Though questions remain about the device and data collection, what researchers found alarmed them. Alongside the complaint to federal regulators, the coalition launched a website that outlines specific ways in which experts say the device raises privacy concerns and breaks the law:
Amazon’s process for reviewing personal information places undue burden on parents. It does not allow parents to search through information collected, instead requiring them to read or listen to every voice recording of their child’s interaction with the device.
Amazon’s parental consent mechanism does not provide assurance that the person giving consent is the parent of the child. Among other issues, it can be bypassed by a kid with a disposable debit gift card.
Amazon keeps children’s personal information longer than reasonably necessary. It only deletes information if a parent explicitly requests deletion by contacting customer service, otherwise it is retained forever.
Amazon fails to clearly explain how to delete information collected about children through Echo Dot Kids Edition.
Amazon’s website and literature directs parents trying to delete information collected about their child to the voice recording deletion page and fails to disclose that deleting voice recordings does not delete the underlying information. This is a material omission likely to mislead reasonable parents.
Amazon does not give notice or obtain parental consent before recording the voices of children that do not live in the home (visiting friends, family, etc.) with the owner of the device.
Amazon’s direct notice does not satisfy COPPA’s requirements as it is missing key pieces of information. Its online notice is also unsatisfactory as it includes so much confusing and unrelated information that a parent would be unable to decipher what applied to Echo Dot Kids Edition.
Amazon does not disclose which kid skills (developed by 3rd parties) collect child personal information or what they collect. It tells parents to read the privacy policy of each kid skill (impermissible under COPPA). 84.6% of kid skills do not provide privacy policies.
The groups also released a video that shows a test of the device’s “remember” feature. As IPR put it, “Amazon forgot to teach Alexa how to ‘forget.'”
“Amazon markets Echo Dot Kids as a device to educate and entertain kids, but the real purpose is to amass a treasure trove of sensitive data that it refuses to relinquish even when directed to by parents,” said CCFC executive director Josh Golin. “The FTC must hold Amazon accountable for blatantly violating children’s privacy law and putting kids at risk.”
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) submitted a letter to FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson Thursday, also calling for a federal investigation of the Amazon device.
View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
Ed Markey
?
@SenMarkey
The Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition captures voice recordings and vast amounts of personal information on the children who speak to it, potentially violating federal law. @SenBlumenthal, @SenatorDurbin, @SenHawleyPress, and I are calling for the FTC to investigate.
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11:30 AM - May 9, 2019
24 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
“We urge the commission to take all necessary steps to ensure their privacy as ‘Internet of Things’ devices targeting young consumers come to market,” the lawmakers wrote, “including promptly initiating an investigation in the Amazon Echo Dot Edition’s compliance with COPPA.”
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http://www.alternet.org/food/county-worst-childhood-hunger-america
...
“You’d think he would be more concerned about getting an Xbox. But he was really excited about oranges. A kid should be excited about learning and playing and growing, not worried about where their next meal is coming from.”
When Feeding America issued its annual Map the Hunger Gap, Apache and four other counties atop the northern part of Arizona—stretching the full expanse from the eastern state line to the west—were the darkest shade of green included on the map’s legend. The color indicated that more than 30 percent of kids in those areas are food insecure, meaning they live in households that experience limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods. Apache County, a long, narrow strip in the northeast corner of Arizona, includes parts of the Navajo Nation as well as the Zuni and Fort Apache Native American reservations. There, 42 percent of children—9,050 kids—are food insecure, twice the national rate.
There isn’t much out there in Northeast Arizona, Martinez explained. “When I say ‘rural,’ most people think farms and ranches. Arizona rural is very desolate, especially in the northeast part of the state,” he said. “You really don’t get a grasp of how rural these parts are until you see it.” He described a beautiful but sparsely populated landscape with communities clustered in chapter houses, towns, and villages—some of which are thousands of years old. Traveling to a major population center can be a substantial drive—an hour or two, or more—and those destinations may not have a grocery store.
“There’s still very few amenities. There are not very many grocery stores. Running water is very limited,” Martinez said. “It is definitely a different world.” In recent years, some extra federal money coming to schools and antihunger groups have helped to make up some of the difference—but that funding may dry up if Congress makes proposed changes to the federal Child Nutrition Programs.
That world includes schools where 100 percent of the children qualify for subsidized lunches. Martinez, who previously taught middle school, said he could identify hungry children in the classroom by their appearance: brittle hair, sallow skin more apt to bruise and break, weight loss or, conversely, obesity—and behavior that can be, in turns, aggressive, anxious, or distracted.
“They’re wondering where their next meal is coming from instead of being a kid,” he said. Oranges over Xboxes. “And that’s even if the child makes it to school in the first place.”
The United Food Bank, which also provides food aid throughout the state, sends kids home from school on Friday with packs of food to get them through the weekend, but those individual rations end up being split among a family. “This is really the Third World among us,” Ginny Hildebrand, the nonprofit’s CEO, told USA Today.
Nearly half a million children in Arizona meet the income eligibility requirements for the free and reduced lunch program, yet less than 15 percent of them are able to access meals during the summer months when school is not in session. Agencies like St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance were able to provide more meals to more hungry kids after 2010’s Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill. Five years ago, St. Mary’s served 1,500 daily after-school and summer meals. Now it serves 6,000, Martinez said.
But that progress is now in jeopardy. Congress reviews and reauthorizes federal child nutrition programs every five years, and the passage of the 2015 Child Nutrition Reauthorization is already overdue—and the version written by House GOP leaders threatens, among other things, to undercut the Community Eligibility Provision. One of the most successful components of the bill, that provision allowed high-poverty schools or districts to serve all students free meals, regardless of their eligibility, by demonstrating that at least 40 percent of their students were certified for free meals through other federal programs, such as food stamps. It fed more kids with less paperwork and zero stigma.
The House Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill would jack up the qualifying threshold from 40 percent to 60. Because that 40 percent threshold doesn’t come close to capturing all the needy kids, Politico calculated the change would mean even “schools with between 65 and 96 percent of their students qualifying for nutrition assistance would likely have to drop CEP.”
Matt Herrick, director of communications at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is highly critical of the proposed change. He issued a statement, published in full by The Lunch Tray, saying the reauthorization plan is, “harmful to children’s health, heaps administrative costs on schools, and plans to bury parents in more bureaucratic red tape, all while subsidizing well-off children at the expense of our less fortunate kids who need help.”
Proposed measures like this make it harder for agencies like St. Mary’s to do their real work, Martinez said. “We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for smaller nonprofits, to remove as much paperwork as possible, so that we’re able to focus less on pushing paper and more on feeding hungry children,” he said.
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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/private-prison-companies-openly-boast-about-soaring-profits-locking-children-and
The largest private prison companies in the United States are assuring their shareholders that profits are up, thanks in part to the windfall from locking up women and children in controversial “family detention centers.”
"We are pleased with our first quarter financial performance, which exceeded our first quarter guidance despite incremental startup expenses incurred during the operational ramp of our Trousdale Turner Correctional Center," said Damon Hininger, chief executive officer of the private prison behemoth Corrections Corporation of America, in a press statement issued earlier this month. "Our financial performance was driven primarily by stronger than anticipated demand from our federal partners, most notably Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
According to the company’s assessment, the spike in revenue was “primarily attributable to a contract at the South Texas Family Residential Center,” which brought in over $70 million during the first quarter of 2016 alone—roughly double levels seen in the first quarter of 2015.
The prison-like facility is located in Dilley, Texas and holds up to 2,400 women and children. Atlanticmagazine writer J. Weston Phippen reports that more than half of the people incarcerated there are children whose average age is nine.
Remarkably, the company’s statement came the same day a judge imposed a two-week restraining order on the facility to temporarily prevent the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services from implementing a childcare license for the prison. The advocacy organization Grassroots Leadership has vigorously opposed such licensing, arguing that the facilities are prisons, not childcare accommodations.
“We’re talking about prison-like conditions, in that people are locked up with their kids in these facilities,” said Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership, in an interview with AlterNet. “When you talk to the moms there, they say that their kids are really suffering in detention.”
Meanwhile, Brian Evans, senior vice president and chief financial officer of the private prison giant GEO Group, reported in a late April conference call with shareholders, “Our revenues for the first quarter 2016 increased to approximately $510 million from $427 million a year ago.” This was attributed, in part, to the “activation of the 626-bed expansion of the Karnes residential center in December 2015.”
The Karnes camp, also located in Texas, has been the site of repeated hunger strikes over inhumane conditions, including nearly free labor, lack of legal representation and contaminated drinking water. In 2014, some women detained at the prison alleged that guards sexually assaulted them.
“The conditions in which our children find themselves, are not good. Our children are not eating well and every day they are losing weight,” dozens of women at the camp declared last year in a joint statement. “In the name of the mothers, residents of the Center for Detentions in Karnes City, we are writing this petition whereby we ask to be set free with our children. There are mothers here who have been locked in this place for as long as 10 months.”...
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