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A Loss in the Courts Won’t Stop Missouri’s Anti-Abortion Wave

Mother Jones

For decades, Missouri has embarked on a quest to eliminate abortion access. Earlier this year, state legislators filed some 14 anti-abortion proposals before the start of the session, making it a prominent example of emboldened efforts on the state level in the Trump era. Those measures were dealt a blow last week when a federal judge suspended two longstanding abortion restrictions in the state, but with the GOP controlling every level of the state’s government, state lawmakers are undeterred in their efforts to restrict abortion access.

Today, a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis is the state’s sole abortion provider licensed to serve approximately 1.2 million women of reproductive age, many of whom would face a 370 mile drive to access services, a process further protracted by a mandatory 72-hour waiting period. “People are driving hours to St. Louis, or they’re crossing over the state line into Kansas or other states in order to access services,” says Laura McQuade, the President and CEO of Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, one of the Planned Parenthood affiliates that filed a lawsuit last year challenging the Missouri restrictions.

As a leader in restricting abortion access, Missouri passed laws more than a decade ago that required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals and abortion clinics to meet the same structural requirements as ambulatory surgical centers. These laws were subsequently also passed in Texas, where they were challenged and finally struck down by the Supreme Court in a 5-3 ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016.

Last week, in response to a challenge filed last fall by two Planned Parenthood affiliates with Missouri clinics, US District Court Judge Howard Sachs agreed to enjoin Missouri’s version of the restrictions. Sachs first announced his decision in an April 3 memo sent to the parties involved in the case. In his decision, Sachs noted that the restrictions had negatively affected women in the state and failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling. “The abortion rights of Missouri women, guaranteed by constitutional rulings, are being denied on a daily basis, in irreparable fashion,” he said. “The public interest clearly favors prompt relief.” The restrictions will be halted while the effort to permanently strike down the laws moves through the courts.

Sachs’ ruling could have an immediate impact on abortion access in the state. Shortly after the decision was announced, the Missouri Planned Parenthood affiliates released a joint statement confirming their desire to increase the number of local abortion providers by expanding services to four additional Planned Parenthood locations. But Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley has promised to appeal the decision, saying that it was “wrong” with the dire consequence that laws that “protect the health and safety of women who seek to obtain an abortion” can no longer be enforced.

Last week’s ruling, however, is unlikely to deter state legislators from pursuing further abortion restrictions. Around the same time that Sachs issued the April 3 memo announcing his intent to grant the injunction, two Republican state Senators, frustrated that they were unable to block a St. Louis nondiscrimination ordinance protecting women that are pregnant, use birth control, or have had an abortion, took time during a discussion of tax hikes benefiting the state zoo to joke that women should go to the St. Louis Zoo for abortions, suggesting that it was “safer” and better regulated than the state’s lone abortion provider.

Meanwhile, shortly after Republicans in Congress moved to defund Planned Parenthood, state Republican Rep. Robert Ross proposed an amendment to House Bill 11—an appropriations bill for the Missouri Department of Social Services—that would allow the state to prevent “abortion services” providers from receiving state family planning funding. This could potentially include any group that provides even abortion referrals upon request. Allison Dreith, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri characterized the amended bill as having the potential to create “a public health crisis in our state, if family planning clinics, hospitals, and Planned Parenthood are defunded from Medicaid reimbursement.” The measure passed the House on a 107-39 vote and is now with the Senate.

Missouri lawmakers have faced some unintended consequences in their zeal to cut back on family planning services. In 2016, the state rejected the federal family planning funding it had received through Extended Women’s Health Services, a Medicaid program for low-income women funded by both the state and federal governments. Federal law already prevents Medicaid from reimbursing providers for the costs of most abortions, but Missouri legislators hoped to go further by completely cutting off funding to groups like Planned Parenthood by rejecting some $8.3 million dollars in federal funds, opting to create a state-funded program that would no longer have to abide by federal rules mandating that patients have the ability to choose their health care provider.

In the months leading up to the measure taking effect, Missouri has moved to block all abortion providers, including hospitals, from receiving family planning funding. But to the consternation of Missouri conservatives, many Planned Parenthood clinics in the state remained eligible for the program because they are not permitted to provide abortions. “Despite that being a simple amendment last year, apparently the Department of Social Services was confused,” Ross said when discussing his proposed amendment earlier this month, according to reports from the Missouri House of Representatives newsroom. Ross’ HB 11 amendment would change things by ensuring that even those who provide information about or referrals for abortions are excluded from the funding program.

“They have defined ‘abortion services’ so broadly that it is going to basically decimate the entire family planning network across the state of Missouri,” says Michelle Trupiano, the executive director of the Missouri Family Health Council, which allocates funding to 71 clinics in the state under the federal government’s Title X family planning program.

Trupiano notes that under the conditions of Title X, many of the state’s family planning providers are required to offer abortion referrals upon request, a mandate that could open them up to losing funding should HB 11 be adopted. “There wouldn’t be a single provider that could participate in the program,” she adds. With less than a month remaining in Missouri’s legislative session, advocates have begun lobbying lawmakers in hopes of defeating the amendment.

But given the history, advocates say, some lawmakers in Missouri will do anything to restrict abortion, even if it means an overall reduction in access for women to health care options in the process. “Responsible legislators want to move forward to other issues,” McQuade says. “But this is what Missouri is choosing to spend its time on right now. It’s deeply disheartening.”

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A Loss in the Courts Won’t Stop Missouri’s Anti-Abortion Wave

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Obama: Americans Are Not as Divided as Some Suggest

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama said on Saturday that America “is not as divided as some have suggested,” after a week marked by violence that included two police shootings of unarmed black men and a mass shooting that claimed the lives of five police officers and injured seven more in Dallas on Thursday night.

“This has been a tough week,” Obama told reporters during a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, where he attended his last NATO summit. “First and foremost for the families who have been killed, but also for the entire American family.”

“There is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion about next steps, but there is unity in recognizing that this is not how we want our communities to operate,” he continued. “This is not who we want to be as Americans.”

He also spoke about the US commitment to the NATO alliance, NATO’s importance for international security, the possible impact of Brexit on trade, and global concerns about terrorism.

“In this challenging moment I want to take this opportunity to state clearly what will never change, and that is the unwavering commitment of the United States to the security and defense of Europe, to our transatlantic relationship, to our commitment to our common defense,” he said.

Asked about his reactions to the announcement from FBI Director James Comey that the agency would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton in the criminal investigation looking into alleged misconduct over her use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state, Obama replied, “I will continue to be scrupulous about not commenting on it.”

Obama’s remarks were dominated by the events of the past week and the problems of violence and race relations in the United States. “I’ve said this before: We are unique among advanced countries in the scale of violence that we experience. And I’m not just talking about mass shootings, I’m talking about the hundreds of people who have already been shot this year in my hometown of Chicago,” he said.

Calling the attacker in Dallas a “demented individual,” the president emphasized that his actions do not define the American people. “They don’t speak for us,” he said. “That’s not who we are.”

Obama noted that the troubled history of racial bias in America’s criminal justice system still lingers, and said he will reconvene a task force created following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to come up with practical solutions that can make a difference.

When reflecting on his legacy, especially regarding race relations, he said he hoped his daughters and their children would live in a more equal and just society.

“You know we plant seeds,” he said. “And somebody else maybe sits under the shade of the tree that we planted. And I’d like to think that as best as I could, I have been true in speaking about these issues.”

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Obama: Americans Are Not as Divided as Some Suggest

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A huge amount of air pollution comes from farming, not just power plants

Agriculture

A huge amount of air pollution comes from farming, not just power plants

By on 18 Sep 2015commentsShare

A new study pegs a number to one of the trickiest scourges of industrialism: premature deaths caused by air pollution. Using high-resolution health statistics and a slew of mathematical models, researchers from Germany, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, and the United States estimate that smog and soot kill 3.3 million people annually.

But the study, published in Nature, also reveals a counterintuitive insight. In industrialized countries, a huge number of these deaths can be attributed to air pollution due to agriculture — regular old farms. The Star Tribune reports:

The United States, with 54,905 deaths in 2010 from soot and smog, ranks seventh highest for air pollution deaths. What’s unusual is that the study says that agriculture caused 16,221 of those deaths, second only to 16,929 deaths blamed on power plants.

In the U.S. Northeast, all of Europe, Russia, Japan and South Korea, agriculture is the No. 1 cause of the soot and smog deaths, according to the study. Worldwide, agriculture is the No. 2 cause with 664,100 deaths, behind the more than 1 million deaths from in-home heating and cooking done with wood and other biofuels in developing world.

The problem with farms is ammonia from fertilizer and animal waste, [lead author Jos] Lelieveld said. That ammonia then combines with sulfates from coal-fired power plants and nitrates from car exhaust to form the soot particles that are the big air pollution killers, he said. In London, for example, the pollution from traffic takes time to be converted into soot, and then it is mixed with ammonia and transported downwind to the next city, he said.

If air pollution levels continue to rise at current rates, the authors estimate that the premature deaths from soot and smog exposure will amount to 6.6 million annually by 2050. Even without the projections, air pollution kills more people per year than HIV and malaria combined, said Lelieveld.

However, current regulatory efforts targeting greenhouse gas emissions are expected to reduce smog levels, as well. If you’re a power plant, reducing carbon emissions also means reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, which are a chief component of surface-level ozone smog. Unfortunately, as the Nature study reminds us, power plants are only one part of the story.

One upside to the dilemma is that cutting ammonia pollution on farms can be accomplished at fairly reasonable costs — and in some cases, it could be cost saving or revenue neutral. Cutting down on excess protein in feed (that is, in excess of what is required for, say, a target level of milk production), reduces the amount of nitrogen that ends up in animal waste. Nitrogen in farm animal urine — well, really, any urine — is mostly converted to ammonia. Other solutions include careful and conscious application of fertilizers, slurries, and manures.

Keeping animal housing clean and dry can help reduce ammonia emissions, too, and dry housing is better for the animals, anyway. If you’re not doing it for cleaner air, at least do it for Babe.

Source:

Air pollution kills 3.3 million a year globally, but much of it traced to farms, study says

, Minneapolis Star Tribune.

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Repeat After Me: Competition Is Good. Competition Is Good.

Mother Jones

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Did you know that companies facing no competition are likely to charge you more? It’s true! But in case you’d like a bit of evidence for this truism, Binyamin Appelbaum directs our attention to a clever study of mortgage rates from the Chicago Fed. It turns out that when the federal government authorized the mortgage refinancing program called HARP, they set up the rules in a way that discouraged anyone from participating aside from the original lender. This meant that, effectively, the original lender had little or no competition for the refinanced loan.

The results are shown on the right. The HARP rules took effect for mortgages with a loan-to-value ratio of 80 percent or higher. Private label mortgages, which didn’t fall under the new rules, show a normal range of interest rate spreads at all LTV values. Loans backed by Fannie Mae, which did fall under the new rules, show a sharp discontinuity upward precisely at an LTV of 80.

In other words, at exactly the point where lenders faced no effective competition thanks to HARP rules—i.e., Fannie-backed loans with an LTV of 80 or above—interest rate spreads suddenly increased by about 0.2 percent. Without competition, lenders were free to charge a little more, and they did.

I know: you’re shocked. And in case you’re tempted to think that 0.2 percent doesn’t really seem like that much, the authors point out that it adds up fast: “While the anti-competitive features of HARP may appear to have curtailed borrower gains by relatively small amounts, they resulted in sizable increases in profitability for a subset of lenders. These results further highlight the importance of restoring full competitiveness to mortgage refinancing markets.”

Quite so. Competition is good. We’ve paid less and less attention to this over the past few decades, and we do so at our peril. It’s the heart and soul of capitalism.

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Repeat After Me: Competition Is Good. Competition Is Good.

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