Author Archives: LynetteF1

Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Preparing for his dangerous trip north, a Central American teen stops to pen a letter to his uncle in the United States. He writes that his mom is telling him to think hard about the risks: the gangs on the trains, the cartels that kidnap migrants, the days of walking through the desert. But those roadblocks, he writes, are worth it: “I see myself earning a bunch of money in the United States, and my mom here without any worries.”

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”

So begins a new public service announcement aimed at keeping Central American kids from joining the tens of thousands of unaccompanied child migrants who have been apprehended by US authorities in the last year. The PSA soon turns dark, though: After the teen says goodbye to his mother, and his uncle puts down the letter he’s been reading, the camera pulls back from a close-up of the boy, dead on the desert floor. A narrator urges viewers: “They’re our future. Let’s protect them.”

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) developed the TV ads, as well as posters and marimba-infused radio spots, as part of its million-dollar Dangers Awareness Campaign. Rolled out shortly after Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Guatemala in June, the campaign is an attempt to counter rumors that unaccompanied kids will be allowed to stay in the United States. The ads emphasize that the journey is extremely dangerous and that children won’t get legal status if they make it across the border.

The campaign will run for 11 weeks, CBP spokesman Jaime Ruiz told the Associated Press. “We want a relative that is about to send $5,000, $6,000 to a relative in El Salvador to see this message and say, ‘Oh my God, they’re saying that the journey is more dangerous,'” Ruiz said. “We try to counter the version of the smuggler.”

Here’s the other televised PSA, in which two silhouettes—a would-be migrant and a smuggler—discuss heading north, the smuggler turning increasingly aggressive and his shadow occasionally turning into that of a coyote, the slang word for a smuggler:

(Notably, CBP created slightly different versions of each of the stories for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the three countries that have sent the most unaccompanied minors to the US. Watch them all here.)

This type of campaign isn’t anything new. For years, the Mexican government has produced ads about the dangers of walking through the Arizona desert, and several years ago the Department of Homeland Security, as part of CBP’s Border Safety Initiative, distributed CDs to Latin American radio stations with sad songs aimed at slowing immigration from the south. With so many variables at play, it’s virtually impossible to measure their effect.

But with more than 57,000 unaccompanied kids apprehended in the United States since October—a situation that CBP head R. Gil Kerlikowske called “difficult and distressing on a lot of levels” when speaking to members of the Senate homeland security committee on Wednesday—the government seems willing to try anything.

Original article:  

Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US

Relearning the Past: Yes, Rising Inequality is Bad for Economic Growth

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Does high income inequality lead to lower economic growth? There are two main reasons to think it might. The first is simple: rich people spend a smaller percentage of their income than the non-rich. Thus, as more and more income accrues to the rich, we get less net consumption and thus slower growth.

The evidence on this score turns out to be pretty hazy. It seems logical, but if you look at consumption trends over time you just don’t see it. But there’s a second theory that’s more interesting: as inequality rises, the rich increasingly need to find good places to invest all the money they’re accumulating. Eventually concrete business opportunities start to become scarce, so they look around for other places to put their money to work. In practice, this means the rich become net lenders to the middle class. They can hardly be loaning money to each other, after all, since they all have more of it than they can use for current consumption.

So the rich lend money to the middle class, which is an eager recipient because their incomes are stagnant. But as the debt load of the middle class increases, this lending becomes ever more Byzantine and ever more risky. Eventually, the middle class simply can’t take on more debt and the whole system comes to a screeching halt. The result is an economic recession as consumers try to work themselves out from under the mountain of debt they’ve run up.

There’s an intriguing amount of evidence to back up this theory, and in a new report released yesterday a team of IMF researchers provides another reason to believe it. They find that high inequality is indeed associated with slower growth, but the mechanism for that slower growth comes in reduced growth spells. That is, it’s not that countries with high inequality have steady growth rates that happen to be a little lower than countries with low inequality. Rather, they have shorter spells of economic expansion. In particular, the authors find that a 1-point increase in a country’s GINI score (a measure of inequality) is associated with a decrease of about 7 percent in the length of its growth spells.

In other words, countries with high inequality simply can’t maintain economic booms as long as countries with lower inequality. This is consistent with the idea that growth in these countries is driven partly by the rich loaning money to the middle class, which is obviously less sustainable than growth driven by an increase in middle-class wages. In high-inequality countries, growth is too dependent on financialization and leverage. When the merry-go-round stops, as it inevitably must, the boom times are over.

The IMF team also found that—within reason—redistribution doesn’t seem to harm growth. In fact, just the opposite: “The combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution—including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality—are on average pro-growth.”

To pick up on the theme of the previous post, this is something we all understood back in the era when unions were powerful advocates for the middle class. Of course rising middle-class wages are a prerequisite for sustainable growth in a mixed consumer economy like ours. And the more stagnant those wages are—and the aughts were by far the worst decade for stagnant wages since World War II—the more fragile economic growth is.

Now we have an IMF report to add to the technical evidence that middle-class wage stagnation is bad for the economy. But who has the raw political power to force the business community to listen to it?

Link to original:  

Relearning the Past: Yes, Rising Inequality is Bad for Economic Growth

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Relearning the Past: Yes, Rising Inequality is Bad for Economic Growth

How climate deniers are like ignorant patrons of ’80s gay bars

How climate deniers are like ignorant patrons of ’80s gay bars

Ryan Cannon

Writer and gay-rights activist Dan Savage has a provocative piece in the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger, comparing today’s climate deniers to gay men in the early ’80s who refused to face up to the reality of AIDS.

He starts out discussing a recent This American Life segment on ranchers in Colorado who won’t acknowledge that climate change is happening, even as it’s ravaging their land and livelihoods.

Listening to the ranchers in [reporter Julia Kumari] Drapkin’s report—hearing the anger, denial, and fear in their voices—took me back 30 years. They sounded like another group of people whose world was on fire and who also couldn’t bring themselves to face reality. They sounded like people I used to know. They sounded like those faggots who stood around in gay bars in 1983 insisting that AIDS couldn’t be a sexually transmitted infection. Even as their friends lay dying, even as more of their friends and lovers became sick, they couldn’t accept that sex had anything to do with this terrifying new illness.

So what was AIDS if it wasn’t a sexually transmitted infection? It was a conservative conspiracy, they said. Or the science was wrong. Or rigged. Or inconclusive. The medical establishment was homophobic and couldn’t be trusted. The federal bureaucracy was dominated by religious conservatives and couldn’t be trusted. Messengers were shot. Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, was called a fearmonger and a drama queen. Randy Shilts, a gay journalist who called for the closure of San Francisco’s bathhouses, was spit on in the Castro. The first grassroots AIDS activists who tried to pass out condoms were chased out of bars.

Stupid, stupid faggots. Insisting that it wasn’t true—insisting that AIDS couldn’t be sexually transmitted, or insisting that AIDS wasn’t that serious because “only” 1,500 gay men were sick in the summer of 1983—didn’t prevent a pandemic. It was true. It was deadly serious. We would have to live very differently if we wanted to survive in this world. We would have to fight back. We would have to transform ourselves sexually, socially, and politically. And we did that, all of that, but precious time was wasted before gay men began to make the changes that had to be made, and countless lives were lost as a result of the denial and delay that paralyzed us in 1983. …

[T]he conservatives, the poor conservatives, they’re like those faggots in gay bars in 1983. They’re standing around, drinks in hand, insisting that the conflagration currently engulfing them—the conflagration that is engulfing us all—isn’t happening. That it can’t be happening. But just as denial and anger and shooting messengers didn’t save those gay men in Chicago’s bars in 1983, denial and anger won’t save Colorado’s ranchers in 2013. Nature is exacting an awful retribution.

The only question is how much time will be wasted and how many lives will be lost as a result of denial and delay this time.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Continue reading: 

How climate deniers are like ignorant patrons of ’80s gay bars

Posted in Anchor, bamboo, FF, G & F, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How climate deniers are like ignorant patrons of ’80s gay bars

Sen. Reid: "Poison Pill" Immigration Amendment Will Get a Vote

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has called an amendment floated by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) a “poison pill” that, if passed, could kill the immigration bill. Nevertheless, Reid will allow the controversial border security measure, which his fellow Gang of Eighter Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently called “very reasonable,” to come to a floor vote as early as Wednesday before he moves to end debate and bring the full bill to a vote.

Cornyn’s amendment would require the implementation of four security measures before undocumented immigrants could be granted provisional legal status: complete surveillance of the southern border, a 90 percent apprehension success rate for people who cross the border illegally, a mandatory national E-Verify system, and an operational biometrics security system—typically fingerprint identification—at United States air and sea ports. The amendment is strongly opposed by Democrats, as well as some Republicans, who say it would be overly expensive and logistically difficult to implement, and would therefore effectively cripple the 13-year path to citizenship that is the centerpiece of the Senate bill.

“If the Gang of Eight doesn’t take reasonable measures to deal with the border security concerns of the American people, I don’t think we’re going to get an immigration bill,” Cornyn told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “So that itself will be a poison pill.” Reid said Tuesday that he believed the bill, as currently written, already has enough votes to surmount a filibuster. However, the Gang of Eight wants the bill to pass with at least 70 votes to put pressure on the GOP-led House to take action.

The current Senate bill already requires round-the-clock surveillance of the southern border, a 90 percent apprehension rate within five years, and a mandatory E-Verify system. But those measures don’t serve as triggers that would preclude undocumented immigrants from getting legal status before they are implemented. Republicans have clamored for triggers as part of a broader bipartisan compromise, although the conservative Heritage Foundation has come out strongly against Cornyn’s amendment, calling it a “fig leaf” that still puts legal status first and foremost.

Earlier, Cornyn said that his immigration amendment held true to “Ronald Reagan’s old adage: Trust but verify.”

“Trust but Verify” is also the name of a Reagan-inspired amendment authored by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would require the Department of Homeland Security to provide annual reports to Congress to show that the border is “provably secure” before undocumented immigrants would be given provisional legal status. Paul’s amendment is one of nine other amendments that will likely get a vote Wednesday. Both Cornyn and Paul have expressed some willingness to work toward a broader compromise, although many Democrats think Cornyn has been insincere.

View article:

Sen. Reid: "Poison Pill" Immigration Amendment Will Get a Vote

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sen. Reid: "Poison Pill" Immigration Amendment Will Get a Vote

Dot Earth Blog: A Plan to Bring Sun-Powered Irrigation to Poor Farmers

green4us

World of Warcraft: Dawn of the Aspects: Part III – Richard A. Knaak

A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader. […]

iTunes Store
World of Warcraft: Dawn of the Aspects: Part IV – Richard A. Knaak

A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader. […]

iTunes Store
Battle Missions: Death Worlds – Games Workshop

The Emperor’s realm encompasses a million worlds, each with its own potential dangers. Yet certain of these planets are so deadly that they are classified as death worlds. From man-eating flora and fauna to deadly poisonous atmospheres and many stranger things besides, on a death world it’s not just the enemy that your warriors have to worry about! Thi […]

iTunes Store
World of Warcraft: Dawn of the Aspects: Part I – Richard A. Knaak

THE AGE OF DRAGONS IS OVER. Uncertainty plagues Azeroth’s ancient guardians as they struggle to find a new purpose. This dilemma has hit Kalecgos, youngest of the former Dragon Aspects, especially hard. Having lost his great powers, how can he—or any of his kind—still make a difference in the world? The answer lies in the distant past, when savage beasts cal […]

iTunes Store
All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition – Mel Bartholomew

Rapidly increasing in popularity, square foot gardening is the most practical, foolproof way to grow a home garden. That explains why author and gardening innovator Mel Bartholomew has sold more than two million books describing how to become a successful DIY square foot gardener. Now, with the publication of All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition , t […]

iTunes Store
The Honest Life – Jessica Alba

As a new mom, Jessica Alba wanted to create the safest, healthiest environment for her family. But she was frustrated by the lack of trustworthy information on how to live healthier and cleaner—delivered in a way that a busy mom could act on without going to extremes. In 2012, with serial entrepreneur Brian Lee and environmental advocate Christopher Gavigan, […]

iTunes Store
Codex: Grey Knights – Games Workshop

The Grey Knights are the most mysterious of all the Imperium’s many organisations. Few outside the upper echelons of the Inquisition hold any knowledge of the Chapter’s founding, and even these most trusted of men are denied the full truth. For ten thousand years the Grey Knights have stood between the Imperium and the Daemons of the Warp. An incor […]

iTunes Store
How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

iTunes Store
Trident K9 Warriors – Michael Ritland & Gary Brozek

As Seen on “60 Minutes”! As a Navy SEAL during a combat deployment in Iraq, Mike Ritland saw a military working dog in action and instantly knew he’d found his true calling. Ritland started his own company training and supplying dogs for the SEAL teams, U.S. Government, and Department of Defense. He knew that fewer than 1 percent of […]

iTunes Store
World of Warcraft: Dawn of the Aspects: Part II – Richard A. Knaak

A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader. […]

iTunes Store

Original article: 

Dot Earth Blog: A Plan to Bring Sun-Powered Irrigation to Poor Farmers

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dot Earth Blog: A Plan to Bring Sun-Powered Irrigation to Poor Farmers