Category Archives: Landmark

America’s Real Migrant Crisis Is the One You’ve Never Heard Of

by ChetEarl33052 Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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

The migration began shortly after sundown. For most of the encampment’s residents, it had become routine. State officials had swept the park and rousted its inhabitants four times the previous week, and four times the week before that. The residents started by taking down their roofs—tarps, mostly, sometimes patched together with umbrellas. Next came the walls: tents for those who had them, cardboard and sheets for those who didn’t. Finally, they packed up their possessions. No one had many of these. A few sleeping pads and blankets, and maybe some mementos.

Some of the residents loaded their belongings into shopping carts and pushed them down Ilalo Street, away from the park they’d called home since the last sweep. One man pulled his things in a child’s red wagon. A few people attached carts to their bicycles and pedaled northwest, as night fell on the palm trees and grassy squares of Kakaako Waterfront Park, the beachside public recreation area just south of Honolulu’s downtown.

Jaymiola and Jerana had no carts or wagons or bicycles. The sisters gathered up their bedding in their arms, while a companion hoisted their tent over his head for the half-mile trek to Ala Moana Boulevard. Their family used to have two tents, one for the women and girls and another for the men and boys. But the other one, the bigger one, had been thrown out during an earlier sweep, they said. Now the five female family members crowded into the neon green tent—which could maybe, generously, be termed a three-person tent—while the males stayed with friends and relatives in the park.

Jerana, 21, is petite and reticent around strangers. Jaymiola, 18, is taller and more outgoing. But the sisters have the same shy smile, wear their hair in the same bun, and have a habit of completing each other’s sentences. They’re also two of the approximately 8,000 homeless residents of Hawaii. (These are the names they gave me, spelling them patiently but making no pretense of authenticity—hardly any homeless residents I spoke to for this story wanted to use their real names.) The state has the highest rate of homelessness of any in the country, and Honolulu has more homeless than any comparably sized city.

But Hawaii’s homeless epidemic has masked another crisis, one that implicates the highest levels of the US government and has left thousands of legal US residents mired in poverty and homelessness. Jaymiola and Jerana’s family came to Hawaii, via Guam, from the island state of Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). The FSM and two other countries in the Micronesian region have a special relationship with the United States, one that cedes huge swaths of the Pacific Ocean to US military control and gives Micronesians the ability to come freely to America to work and live.

But the federal government has revoked some of the benefits previously available to Micronesians, leaving them unable to afford the health care many of them came for and the high cost of living in Hawaii, their main destination. With climate change inundating the Pacific islands and rendering them increasingly uninhabitable, the flow of migrants is likely to grow in the coming years, along with the struggles of the Micronesians who come to America in search of something better.

“I anticipate that within the next 20 years, it would be so explosive that that’s going to be another significant challenge for US policymakers,” said Esther Kia’aina, the US Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular Affairs.

Homeless residents per 10,000 inhabitants

if(“undefined”==typeof window.datawrapper)window.datawrapper={};window.datawrapper”RWbBi”={},window.datawrapper”RWbBi”.embedDeltas=”100″:240.16666,”200″:225.16666,”300″:225.16666,”400″:225.16666,”500″:225.16666,”600″:225.16666,”700″:225.16666,”800″:225.16666,”900″:225.16666,”1000″:225.16666,window.datawrapper”RWbBi”.iframe=document.getElementById(“datawrapper-chart-RWbBi”),window.datawrapper”RWbBi”.iframe.style.height=window.datawrapper”RWbBi”.embedDeltas[Math.min(1e3,Math.max(100*Math.floor(window.datawrapper”RWbBi”.iframe.offsetWidth/100),100))]+”px”,window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a)if(“undefined”!=typeof a.data”datawrapper-height”)for(var b in a.data”datawrapper-height”)if(“RWbBi”==b)window.datawrapper”RWbBi”.iframe.style.height=a.data”datawrapper-height”b+”px”);

Jaymiola wore a tank top with a faded American flag on the front as she gathered her possessions from Kakaako Waterfront Park, also known as Point Panic Beach Park, named for a surf break off the shore. It became the focus of public alarm last year, when Jaymiola and Jerana and hundreds of other homeless residents set up camp there, many of them forced off city sidewalks in response to pressure from neighbors and businesses. The park is controlled by the state government, which began conducting patrols to enforce the park’s nighttime curfew, pushing residents back out onto city sidewalks along busy Ala Moana Boulevard and nearby streets.

“They try to kick us out of the park, but we have nowhere to go,” said Jaymiola. “So we just come back.”

Migration has defined Jaymiola and Jerana’s lives since they arrived in Honolulu four years ago. In the first public housing complex they called home, 13 family members shared a one-bedroom apartment. In the next, they had more space, but still feared eviction if the housing authority discovered how many of them were living there off-lease. So when Jaymiola turned 18 last year, she came to Kakaako with Jerana and several other family members.

But the story of their migration begins long before the Kakaako sweeps; before the move from one overcrowded apartment to another; before their family’s journey from Chuuk, a collection of tiny islands 3,500 miles southwest of Honolulu, to Guam and then Hawaii. It was set in motion 70 years ago, when the US military governor of the Marshall Islands told the residents of Bikini Atoll they would need to relocate temporarily so the United States could test nuclear weapons there.

Later that year, in 1946, the military dropped two nuclear bombs on Bikini, kicking off a 12-year detonation of the equivalent of 7,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs in the Marshall Islands, an archipelago of more than 1,000 Micronesian islands clustered around 29 coral atolls (ring-shaped reefs encircling lagoons). The residents of Bikini would never be able to return permanently to their former home, now hopelessly contaminated by radiation. US political leaders were not always sympathetic to the displacement of Micronesians that they’d engineered. “There are only 90,000 of them out there,” Henry Kissinger would later say about the relocation of Marshall Islands residents for missile testing. “Who gives a damn?”

Able, the first test of the Operation Crossroads series of nuclear explosions, seen above Bikini. National Security Archive/GWU

Micronesia, which spans 3 million square miles roughly halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, was controlled by Spain in the 19th century, taken over by Germany and then Japan, and finally captured by the United States during World War II. The American government helped resettle the population affected by the nuclear tests and provided financial assistance while continuing to expand its military presence in the region. When the islands gained sovereignty in 1986, their arrangement with the United States was codified in the Compact of Free Association (COFA), signed by two of the newly independent Micronesian states, the FSM and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The Micronesian island of Palau joined the compact and became a sovereign state in 1994.

Under the terms of COFA, the United States retained military control of a wide area of the Pacific and the use of sites for missile tests and other defense functions. In exchange, the Micronesian states received protection by America’s armed forces and economic aid, and their residents gained the right to live and work in the United States without a visa.

At first, the impact of that last provision was minor. In 2003, 17 years after COFA was signed, there were 7,297 residents of the COFA nations living in Hawaii, according to the US Census Bureau. A decade later, that number had more than doubled. The latest Census Bureau figures suggest there could now be as many as 20,000 COFA migrants in Hawaii.

The only way to get to the United States from Micronesia without detouring through Asia is to fly to Hawaii, sometimes by way of Guam. Some Micronesians head onward to the mainland, and substantial populations have settled in Arkansas and Oregon. But the flights are long and expensive, and Hawaii has a familiar climate and geography, as well as the country’s largest Micronesian community.

In the theater of national politics, the presidential election featured breathless proclamations of a migrant invasion of America. Yet the hordes of Mexican rapists and drug traffickers haven’t materialized, and the Syrian refugees whom President-elect Donald Trump has called a “Trojan horse” and said “probably are ISIS” have entered the country largely without incident. By contrast, there’s a real migrant crisis taking place on America’s far western frontier that hardly anyone on the mainland has noticed.

Micronesians living in the United States pay federal taxes. Under COFA, Micronesians are also eligible to serve in the US military, and they do so in large numbers: Citizens of the FSM volunteer for the US armed forces at double the rate of US citizens, although they cannot serve as commissioned officers.

A homeless encampment in Kakaako Waterfront Park. Aaron Wiener

Yet many Micronesians living in Hawaii feel their contributions are not being reciprocated. As non-citizens, they can’t vote. (Although they can live and work freely in the United States, in order to become citizens they must first apply for green cards, which they can’t receive unless they have certain job skills or relatives who are legal permanent residents.) Worse, they’ve lost access to federal safety-net programs to which they were once entitled.

“We gave up a lot for the Compact of Free Association,” said Jojo Peter, a native of Chuuk and co-founder of the COFA Community & Advocacy Network, based in Honolulu. “Almost all of the northern hemisphere between Japan and Hawaii has been given to the United States exclusively for its military purpose.”

Peter continued, “And then we come here and pay taxes just like everybody else, but we don’t have access to the same thing that we pay for. So for us, it’s like we’re paying over and over again for this treatment that we expect to be fair.”

The Marshall Islands and the FSM have the highest rates of diabetes in the world, according to a 2014 survey from the International Diabetes Federation, due largely to the introduction of a Western diet. But there are no dialysis centers in the Marshall Islands or Chuuk, and treatment for other ailments, including cancer, is limited. (Some studies have linked elevated cancer levels in parts of Micronesia to radiation from the nuclear tests, although the science is not settled.) As a result, health care, along with education, is now the most cited reason Micronesians migrate to Hawaii.

But in 1996, 10 years after COFA was signed, a provision of the landmark welfare reform bill, introduced by then-Rep. John Kasich of Ohio and signed by President Bill Clinton, revoked the right of some immigrants to Medicaid and other federal programs, such as food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) stipends. Certain immigrant groups were granted an exception to this change, but the COFA population was not.

“I don’t think anyone thought about the implications for Micronesians,” said a US government official who has worked on Micronesian affairs for many years but was not authorized to speak on the record. “Once it had happened, it was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ And there were almost immediately efforts to put it back.”

But revoking funding for a niche constituency is a lot easier than restoring it, particularly when that population can’t vote. The Hawaiian delegation to Congress has unsuccessfully introduced measures to restore federal benefits to COFA migrants. In the current political climate, the chances of a Republican-controlled Congress appropriating funds for a virtually unknown migrant group with no political voice is effectively zero. The result is a peculiar imbalance: Legal immigrants from most foreign countries gain access to federal benefits such as Medicaid after five years in the United States, but migrants from the COFA countries, who enjoy the unique privilege of unfettered residency in America, do not.

Micronesians who come to Hawaii in search of medical care or economic opportunity find instead that they can’t afford the treatments they’re seeking or the cost of living, the highest of any state. Isolated from the mainland and limited in the supply of increasingly valuable land, Hawaii ranks first in the cost of housing, utilities, groceries, and transportation. Honolulu is the most expensive metropolitan area in America. The growing number of Micronesian arrivals in recent years has coincided with annual increases in Hawaiian homelessness for each of the past five years and a rising share of the homeless who are unsheltered, which reached 50 percent last year.

Like Jaymiola and Jerana, most arrivals from Micronesia don’t take directly to the streets. Many land first in public housing. But they often don’t last long. Micronesian cultures are built around family ties, and extended families are accustomed to living together. So Micronesian families of a dozen or more people, unfamiliar with the rules and customs, pack into small public-housing apartments. The result is often eviction, or departure before an eviction can take place.

The most common complaint among Micronesians living in Hawaii is discrimination. For a state where one-fifth of the population was born in another country, Hawaii has a heritage of entrenched stereotypes against the latest immigrant group. Samoans bore the brunt of it until Micronesians began arriving.

Hawaii state spending on COFA population (in millions):

if(“undefined”==typeof window.datawrapper)window.datawrapper={};window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”={},window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”.embedDeltas=”100″:168.16666,”200″:153.16666,”300″:153.16666,”400″:153.16666,”500″:153.16666,”600″:153.16666,”700″:153.16666,”800″:153.16666,”900″:153.16666,”1000″:153.16666,window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”.iframe=document.getElementById(“datawrapper-chart-Y70ZN”),window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”.iframe.style.height=window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”.embedDeltas[Math.min(1e3,Math.max(100*Math.floor(window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”.iframe.offsetWidth/100),100))]+”px”,window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a)if(“undefined”!=typeof a.data”datawrapper-height”)for(var b in a.data”datawrapper-height”)if(“Y70ZN”==b)window.datawrapper”Y70ZN”.iframe.style.height=a.data”datawrapper-height”b+”px”);

In Kakaako Waterfront Park, perhaps 100 yards from Jaymiola and Jerana, three women shared a tattered, makeshift tent. They were all native Hawaiians, and they scoffed when I said I was writing a story about the challenges facing Micronesians in the state.

“This is Hawaii,” said one, who declined to give her name. “It’s hard for everyone. It’s expensive.” She complained, “If you try to get welfare, you won’t get it. But the Micronesians will get it.”

Micronesians have become the present-day Hawaiian version of the welfare queens of Reagan-era America. Many locals, a rung or two up the economic ladder from the new Micronesian arrivals, view them as lazy, unmotivated, and entitled—common stereotypes for any new migrant group—and think they’ve come to the United States to live regally on public largesse. The problem, of course, is that they’re no longer eligible for most federal benefits. They’re welfare queens who don’t qualify for welfare.

Inflated reports of the Micronesian presence at Honolulu’s homeless encampments, fueled by these stereotypes, have skewed perceptions of the share of the homeless who are Micronesian and the share of Micronesians who are homeless. It’s hard to come by exact figures, but two things are clear: Contrary to widespread beliefs, COFA migrants do not make up a majority of Hawaii’s homeless residents, but they do represent a share of the homeless that’s vastly disproportionate to their overall population. Josie Howard, who runs We Are Oceania, a Honolulu nonprofit that assists Micronesians with housing, health care, and employment (and where Jojo Peter serves as community advocacy manager), estimates that about 40 percent of her clients are homeless. But that’s just the people who sleep on the streets or in shelters. An additional 30 percent or more are what she calls “hidden homeless,” often living off-lease with friends or relatives and at risk of falling into homelessness at any moment.

On the day I visited the emergency family shelter operated by the Institute for Human Services (IHS), Honolulu’s oldest and largest homeless services provider, 76 percent of the families staying there were Micronesian, according to Kimo Carvalho, IHS’s community relations director. Many of them had arrived in the summer and fall of 2015, when officials undertook the first big sweeps of Kakaako and another growing homeless encampment, along the banks of the Kapalama Canal.

“The one day they evicted everyone from Kakaako, it was a race to IHS,” said Carvalho. “We filled up in 10 minutes.”

Janet Lorenzo was part of the wave who sought shelter at IHS following last year’s sweeps. She grew up in Chuuk and moved to Honolulu four years ago, spending three of them living in Kakaako Waterfront Park.

“Not fun” is how she described her time there. “There’s no life. I cook under the rain. When the typhoon came, it’s all flooded. It’s hard.”

Still, she was reluctant to seek shelter, wary of the tight rules and curfews she’d heard about. But when the sweeps began last year, Lorenzo gave in and visited IHS, where she still lives with her husband and daughter. She teaches English to the growing population of Chuukese students at a local elementary school, and her husband washes dishes.

Sweeps by city and state officials have made life on the streets a constant hassle. But that’s also part of the strategy.

“People say sweeps don’t work,” said Carvalho. “But Janet Lorenzo’s here.”

Joey Manahan, a member of the Honolulu City Council, was one of the reluctant authors of the laws that have led to the crackdown across the city. His district includes the bulk of the city’s public housing and of its Micronesian residents. On a scorching spring afternoon, we went for a drive along Honolulu’s homeless migration route in his Honda Element. We started in Waikiki, the heart of Honolulu tourism and the first epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis. Homeless residents had lined the sidewalks of the upscale hotel district, until business owners and tourism officials persuaded the city to implement its first sit-lie ban in late 2014. The rules imposed by sit-lie are simple: On the sidewalks of the demarcated area, you can’t sit, and you can’t lie. Put another way, you can’t be homeless.

Jerana and Jaymiola in front of their tent in Kakaako Waterfront Park. Aaron Wiener

So the homeless moved to Ala Moana Park, a green expanse along the shore, facing shimmering high-rises under construction. As the homeless population pushed west, so did the sit-lie ordinances. Chinatown and downtown joined the list. In the Kalihi neighborhood, in Manahan’s district, homeless residents began to sleep along the Kapalama Canal.

“I had over 100 campers at one point,” Manahan said, showing me a photo on his phone. “There were a lot of singles and couples on one side of the canal. And on the other side were all the families. And there were a lot of COFA families.”

Under pressure from nearby businesses, Manahan and the City Council imposed a sit-lie ban for the canal area, overriding the mayor’s veto, and erected a fence along the canal. The homeless residents moved on once again. Manahan doesn’t like resorting to sit-lie bans, saying, “Our policy for homelessness is: Out of sight, out of mind.” But business owners have raised hell at meetings with him. The Micronesians in his district can’t vote. It’s hardly a fair fight.

The staunchest political advocate for Micronesians living in the United States operates far from the streets of Kakaako and Kalihi. Esther Kia’aina, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, established the $250,000 annual grant that funds We Are Oceania’s one-stop center in Kalihi that’s now the service hub of the Micronesian community. A Guam native, Kia’aina is unapologetically blunt, and when I asked if the federal government was meeting its obligations to Micronesians in Hawaii under COFA, she replied, “Clearly not.”

Kia’aina believes the simplest and most important fix would be to restore Micronesians’ access to federal benefits such as Medicaid. But that would require Congress to mobilize behind an issue it’s shown little inclination to tackle. That’s left Kia’aina as one bureaucrat fighting a lonely battle. “We’re just on our own,” she said. “We’re a tiny office. We have less than 40 staff.” Next month, Kia’aina will depart, handing control to Trump administration officials who may not consider aid to an obscure community of islanders a priority.

The most pressing concern for her office, Kia’aina said, is assisting the population that was at the heart of the migration story’s origins: the Bikinians displaced from their home by nuclear testing. Now, some of these Bikinians are living on an island, designated for them after relocation, “that is being inundated with king tides as a result of climate change.” Their struggle is a window into the future of Micronesia. Climate change is beginning to render some of the islands uninhabitable. Most of the Marshall Islands are less than six feet above sea level, and the battle against rising tides is already underway. The out-migration from Micronesia is likely to accelerate, and the United States is the obvious destination.

Compounding the Micronesian exodus is the island nations’ fiscal situation. The COFA countries rely heavily on US aid: It accounts for half of the total revenue in the FSM and 60 percent in the Marshall Islands. But that aid is set to expire in 2023, and the trust funds that are supposed to replace it are unlikely to be adequate. Again, the Trump administration might not feel much imperative to hand taxpayer dollars to a population with no political voice. By appointing vocal opponents of efforts to combat climate change to top positions, Trump has already signaled that slowing the rising seas is not high on his agenda.

These foreboding omens were far from the minds of Jaymiola and Jerana as they sat in Kakaako Waterfront Park and contemplated their more immediate future, wondering where they would sleep that night.

Jaymiola, Jerana, and a friend carry their possessions away from the park ahead of a city sweep. Aaron Weiner

“Out here on the streets, it’s dangerous,” said Jaymiola. “People steal from you.” Their tent was singed on one side, after someone tried to burn it down.

Social workers have tried to recruit them to the Next Step shelter down the road. But they fear it would be even more destabilizing than life in the park.

“Cause we’re gonna get kicked out in the morning,” said Jerana.

“And then it’s just back to the park,” her sister added. For once, she allowed her mind to wander beyond the tedium of their regular migration up and down the same street, beyond their sleeping configurations and the status of their meager possessions. She reflected for a moment on the family decision that took them to Hawaii in the first place, then said, “I regret coming here.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Taken from: 

America’s Real Migrant Crisis Is the One You’ve Never Heard Of

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, Hipe, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Oster, Pines, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on America’s Real Migrant Crisis Is the One You’ve Never Heard Of

A Brief History of the Idea That Everyone Should Get Free Cash for Life

by DedraFreee Posted on December 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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

From the window of his university office in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, philosophy professor Philippe Van Parijs—considered by many to be Europe’s most prominent advocate for the idea that the state should provide a regular income to every citizen—can see the mailbox where he sent off invitations to the first “basic income” conference more than 30 years ago. “I’m quite amazed by the seed we threw on the ground now,” he says.

After decades of obscurity, the idea is suddenly in fashion. Politicians around the world are interested and a handful of governments, such as Finland and the Canadian province of Ontario, are planning or considering basic-income pilot projects.

But the idea of basic income has been around for more than 200 years, rising on waves of political and economic turmoil only to disappear in calmer times. Here are some of the highlights of its long, turbulent history:

Thomas Paine Wikicommons

1795-97: As the Industrial Revolution widened the gap between rich and poor, land reform was seen by some as an answer to social inequity. Thomas Paine, who two decades earlier had written Common Sense, drafted Agrarian Justice in the winter of 1795 and 1796. The earth by right belongs to all people, Paine argued, but the private ownership of land has stripped us of this “natural inheritance”; at 21 years old, citizens should be compensated for their loss with a sum of 15 pounds. A year later, fellow British-born radical Thomas Spence responded with a pamphlet titled The Rights of Infants. Writing in the character of a woman (“because the men are not to be depended on”), Spence said society should be organized into parishes that would lease out all houses and lands and then, after the community’s expenses had been paid, distribute their remaining funds equally among members.

1848: Revolutions erupted across Europe, Karl Marx penned The Communist Manifesto, and Joseph Charlier, a Belgian variously identified as a “writer, an “accountant,” or a “merchant,” wrote The Solution of the Social Problem, now considered the first fully fledged proposal for basic income. His book received little attention and disappeared until two European academics stumbled upon it 150 years later and wrote an article that established Charlier’s place in history.

Late 1910s and 1920s: Social movements demanded a radical redistribution of resources after the devastation of World War I. In England, two young Quakers published a pamphlet calling for a weekly “state bonus” for all citizens of the United Kingdom. The idea gained a following and was considered by the Labor Party in 1920 but ultimately rejected.

Sen. Huey Long Wikimedia Commons

1930s: The Great Depression swept across the industrialized world, wiping out jobs and sending poverty soaring. In 1934, populist (and famously corrupt) Louisiana Sen. Huey Long addressed the country on the radio and called for the confiscation of wealth from the richest and guaranteed annual incomes for all families, a program he called “Share Our Wealth.” The movement was cut short by Long’s assassination in 1935. That same year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the landmark Social Security Act, creating the anti-poverty program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children—or “welfare.”

1940s: Conservative economists Milton Friedman and George Stigler, both future Nobel laureates, developed the idea of a “negative income tax” (NIT), essentially a guaranteed income administered through the tax system. Low-income filers would receive checks from the government rather than pay taxes; as their earnings increased, so would their tax burden, but also the total amount the filer took home. Friedman’s plan may come as a surprise to his small-government acolytes, but the economist firmly believed an NIT would address poverty without adding to the state bureaucracy he reviled.

1962-63: Basic income went mainstream as attention turned to poverty, unemployment, and the massive northern migration of African Americans. In 1963, critic Dwight Macdonald argued for the necessity of a guaranteed income for all families in an influential review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America in The New Yorker. Friedman made the case for an NIT in his book Capitalism and Freedom, while on the left, economist Robert Theobald outlined his “Basic Economic Security plan”—a proposal strikingly similar to modern basic-income schemes. Economists in the Kennedy administration embarked on a federal anti-poverty campaign, which, after Kennedy’s assassination, became Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

1964-68: Racially charged riots, with demands for economic justice, erupted in cities across the country. In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a guaranteed minimum income for all people. Protests organized by welfare rights groups raised the pressure on government to address poverty and guaranteed income gained popularity within the administration. In a 1966 report, Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers said a negative income tax “would be the most direct approach to reducing poverty” and “deserve(s) further exploration.” By 1968, a surprising cast of characters, including heads of major companies, had lent support to the idea. John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson joined more than 1,200 economists in signing a statement advocating a “national system of income guarantees and supplements.”

1969-71: Richard Nixon repudiated guaranteed income on the campaign trail, but after his election, he was persuaded that it might be the best solution to the so-called “welfare mess.” In a televised address in August, Nixon presented his Family Assistance Plan (FAP). While Nixon insisted that it was “not a guaranteed income” because it included work requirements, the plan owed its central tenets to the guaranteed-income debate and would have made a radical break with past poverty policy. Families headed by both working and unemployed adults were eligible, erasing a historic line between the “deserving” poor (the old, disabled, and mothers with young children) and “undeserving” (people who are physically able to work).

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Marion S. Trikosko / Library of Congress

In 1970, Nixon’s bill easily passed the House but stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, which was chaired by Huey Long’s son, Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a proponent of the plan within the administration, wrote in a memo to Nixon that for Southern committee members “it would very likely mean the end of those political dynasties built on poverty and racial division.” Nixon’s plan died in committee. A revised version met the same fate the following year.

Late 1960s to the early 1980s: Beginning in 1968, the US government ran four groundbreaking negative income tax trials involving nearly 9,000 families. In Canada, between 1974 and 1979, the government turned the tiny, isolated town of Dauphin into a living laboratory where qualified residents received a guaranteed annual income equivalent to about $15,000 for a family of four. (The Canadian data was never analyzed; a determined academic discovered the documents in the early 2000s, packed away in 1,800 dusty boxes in a Winnipeg warehouse.) The US experiments, which were primarily intended to study an NIT’s impact on labor, found only small reductions in work effort. But researchers reported that the trials in Seattle and Denver appeared to increase the rate of marriage dissolution by 40 percent to 60 percent. Although the results were later disputed, the damage was done. Moynihan, now a senator and once an avid supporter in Congress, renounced guaranteed income. But Nixon’s welfare reform efforts did have a lasting impact: Supplementary Security Income (income support for the aged, blind, and disabled) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (an NIT applied solely to the working poor) were enacted in 1972 and 1974.

Jay Hammond Wikicommons

1982: In 1976, as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline neared completion, Jay Hammond, a professional hunter turned governor, proposed a system of dividends to be paid to all Alaskans from a state oil fund established in 1976. The program dispensed its first dividends in 1982, in effect becoming the first basic-income system in the United States. Last year, the state sent checks of $2,072 to nearly 650,000 residents. In June, current Gov. Bill Walker capped payments at $1,000 per person this year to help cover Alaska’s budget deficit.

Early 1980s to 1990s: In 1982, Philippe Van Parijs, then a young Belgian academic losing sleep to fears of unfettered capitalism, landed on the idea of a basic income. He found like-minded thinkers across Europe, and in 1986 they scraped together enough money for the first basic-income conference. At that meeting, the Basic Income Europe Network (“BIEN,” or “good” in French) was born. In 2004, at the insistence of a growing international contingent, the organization was renamed the Basic Income Earth Network.

1997: Mexico launched a large-scale conditional cash transfer program (CCT), or a system of direct cash payments to poor households, followed in 2001 by Brazil and Colombia. While CCTs are not identical to basic income—the grants come with requirements, such as sending children to school, and are only given to the poor—they also operate on the assumption that people can be trusted to spend cash grants wisely. CCT programs spread rapidly across Latin America in the early 2000s and on to parts of Asia and Africa. Tens of millions of impoverished people worldwide now receive financial assistance through CCTs funded by governments, international aid organizations, and nonprofits.

Zephania Kameeta Wikicommons

2006-11: At a BIEN conference in Cape Town, South Africa, Zephania Kameeta, then head of the Namibian Evangelical Lutheran Church, shouted in frustration: “Words! Words! Words!” Kameeta was fed up with the endless scholarly discussions and lack of progress, so after the conference he set about organizing a real-life basic-income trial. By early 2008, a basic-income coalition assembled by the bishop had launched a pilot project in an impoverished settlement. Two years later, a group of researchers began a series of basic-income experiments in rural India involving more than 6,000 individuals.

2015-Present: The Canadian province of Ontario pledged to roll out a basic income trial in 2017, with the Dutch city of Utrecht to follow in 2017. The Finnish government mulled a pilot project with up to 10,000 participants. In the United States, where Silicon Valley bigwigs were among basic income’s most vocal supporters, the startup incubator Y Combinator in June announced plans to start a pilot project this year in Oakland, California, that will distribute up to $2,000 a month to a few dozen people. Another private enterprise, the US-based nonprofit GiveDirectly, is planning an extended trial in Kenya that will span 10 to 15 years and involve at least 6,000 participants.

2016: On June 5, Switzerland became the first country to vote on, and roundly defeat, a national basic income. Opponents argued that the policy would have discouraged work and undermined the Swiss economy. But for basic-income advocates, the referendum was remarkable. Just a few decades ago, Van Parijs remembers, it was “difficult to find 30 people who had heard of the idea.”

See original:  

A Brief History of the Idea That Everyone Should Get Free Cash for Life

Posted in Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, ProPublica, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Brief History of the Idea That Everyone Should Get Free Cash for Life

Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

by EdisonAndronicu Posted on December 20, 2016

The administration announced Tuesday that President Obama will use a provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to halt new offshore drilling in parts of federally owned Arctic and Atlantic waters — forever. While previous presidents have used that act to protect parts of the ocean, this is the first time it’s been exercised to enact a permanent ban on drilling. Canada will also indefinitely ban future drilling in its Arctic territory, the country said in the joint announcement.

The announcement came four weeks shy of Obama’s White House departure. President-elect Trump, a climate change denier, has vowed to undo many of Obama’s executive orders as well as dismantle the Clean Power Plan, open more federal lands to drilling, and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

But by using an existing act instead of issuing an executive order, Obama made the reversal of this drilling ban more difficult for his successor.

“We know now, more clearly than ever, that a Trump presidency will mean more fossil fuel corruption and less governmental protection for people and the planet, so decisions like these are crucial,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols. “President Obama should do this and more to stop any new fossil fuel infrastructure that would lock in the worst effects of climate change.”

This story has been updated. 

See the original post – 

Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, Landmark, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet the most pro-climate appointee Trump has made yet.

Trump team wants details on the State Department’s climate efforts. That can’t be good.

by PrincessAbg Posted on December 20, 2016

The administration announced Tuesday that President Obama will use a provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to halt new offshore drilling in parts of federally owned Arctic and Atlantic waters — forever. While previous presidents have used that act to protect parts of the ocean, this is the first time it’s been exercised to enact a permanent ban on drilling. Canada will also indefinitely ban future drilling in its Arctic territory, the country said in the joint announcement.

The announcement came four weeks shy of Obama’s White House departure. President-elect Trump, a climate change denier, has vowed to undo many of Obama’s executive orders as well as dismantle the Clean Power Plan, open more federal lands to drilling, and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

But by using an existing act instead of issuing an executive order, Obama made the reversal of this drilling ban more difficult for his successor.

“We know now, more clearly than ever, that a Trump presidency will mean more fossil fuel corruption and less governmental protection for people and the planet, so decisions like these are crucial,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols. “President Obama should do this and more to stop any new fossil fuel infrastructure that would lock in the worst effects of climate change.”

This story has been updated. 

Jump to original:  

Trump team wants details on the State Department’s climate efforts. That can’t be good.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, Landmark, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump team wants details on the State Department’s climate efforts. That can’t be good.

Obama put a permanent kibosh on offshore drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic.

by StefanieCallaway Posted on December 20, 2016

The administration announced Tuesday that President Obama will use a provision in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to halt new offshore drilling in parts of federally owned Arctic and Atlantic waters — forever. While previous presidents have used that act to protect parts of the ocean, this is the first time it’s been exercised to enact a permanent ban on drilling. Canada will also indefinitely ban future drilling in its Arctic territory, the country said in the joint announcement.

The announcement came four weeks shy of Obama’s White House departure. President-elect Trump, a climate change denier, has vowed to undo many of Obama’s executive orders as well as dismantle the Clean Power Plan, open more federal lands to drilling, and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

But by using an existing act instead of issuing an executive order, Obama made the reversal of this drilling ban more difficult for his successor.

“We know now, more clearly than ever, that a Trump presidency will mean more fossil fuel corruption and less governmental protection for people and the planet, so decisions like these are crucial,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols. “President Obama should do this and more to stop any new fossil fuel infrastructure that would lock in the worst effects of climate change.”

This story has been updated. 

Visit link – 

Obama put a permanent kibosh on offshore drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, Landmark, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama put a permanent kibosh on offshore drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic.

Hey Trump, check this out: 78 percent of voters think climate pollution should be regulated and/or taxed.

by petra67k2773131 Posted on December 14, 2016

That name stands for “a new way forward in mobility,” not “we’re making way mo’ cars that will drive themselves around while your grandparents make out inside.”

Anyone viewing this heartwarming brand identity video, though, can see that the latter is clearly part of the mission objective.

The video also features a first: Steve Mahan, a legally blind man, rides around a residential neighborhood in Austin, Texas, in a Google car with no pedals or steering wheel — the first member of the public to make such a trip alone on public roads. That trip was taken in October 2015, a year before Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck company, made its historic autonomous beer delivery in Colorado.

Like Otto, Waymo plans to license its self-driving technology to automakers and trucking companies, rather than try to manufacture the cute cars featured in the promo video. Its first licensing deal is for 100 Fiat Chrysler minivans, but they’ll be for testing only and won’t be sold to the public.

On Tuesday, Waymo Chief Executive John Krafcik declined to speculate on how quickly self-driving cars will spread, but said, “we are close to bringing this to a lot of people.”

Read original article:

Hey Trump, check this out: 78 percent of voters think climate pollution should be regulated and/or taxed.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Oster, oven, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hey Trump, check this out: 78 percent of voters think climate pollution should be regulated and/or taxed.

Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said About Global Warming

by bT2jW9hX8q Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Donald Trump has a lot of things to say about global warming. He’s called it an urgent problem, and he’s called it a hoax. He’s claimed it’s a scam invented by the Chinese, and he’s denied that he ever said that. He’s promised to “cancel” the historic Paris climate agreement, and he’s said he still has an “open mind” on the matter.

Some environmental activists have pointed to Trump’s unpredictable statements as evidence that he might not follow through on his campaign pledges to dismantle the Obama administration’s climate legacy. But Trump has already put one of the nation’s most prominent climate skeptics in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency transition. And just last week, one of Trump’s top aides assured Americans that the president-elect still believes climate science is mostly “bunk.”

For those keeping score at home, here’s a timeline of the Donald’s thoughts on global warming. We’ll update it from time to time.

12/6/09

Read the full the letter at Grist.

Trump signs a letter calling for urgent climate action. As Grist reported earlier this year, Trump and three of his children signed a 2009 letter to President Barack Obama calling for a global climate deal. “We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today,” declared the letter, which was signed by dozens of business leaders and published as an ad in the New York Times. “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

2/14/10

Trump changes his mind, says Gore should be stripped of Nobel Prize because it’s cold outside. According to the New York Post, Trump had changed his tune by early 2010, telling an audience at one of his golf clubs, “With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore…Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.” (He would later say he was joking about the Nobel Prize being rescinded.)

2/16/10

Trump claims scientists admitted global warming is a “con.” Around this time, Trump caught wind of the so-called “ClimateGate scandal,” in which climate deniers wrongly claimed a trove of hacked emails showed that scientists had conspired to fabricate evidence of global warming. Trump said (inaccurately) on Fox News that there was an email “sent a couple months ago by one of the leaders of global warming, the initiative…almost saying—I guess they’re saying it’s a con.” He added that “in Washington, where I’m building a big development, nobody can move because we have 48 inches of snow.”

11/6/12

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese.”

12/6/13

Trump declares global warming a “hoax.” As an unusually powerful ice storm ripped through the southern part of the United States, Trump announced that climate change is a “hoax.”

Jan. 2014

Trump says scientists are in on the hoax. On January 6, Trump went on Fox News to discuss a severe cold snap that set records across the country. “This winter is brutal,” said Trump, adding that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by “scientists who are having a lot of fun.” Trump kept up this line of argument throughout the long and miserable winter.

2014

Trump donates money to fight climate change. At some point in 2014, Trump donated $5,000 of his foundation’s money to Protect Our Winters, an advocacy group dedicated to “mobilizing the outdoor sports community to lead the charge towards positive climate action.” As the group’s website explains, “If we’re serious about slowing climate change, it’s imperative that we decrease our dependence on fossil fuels and focus on cleaner sources of energy and electricity.”

An entry in the Donald J. Trump Foundations’s 2014 tax filings

According to the New York Daily News, Trump made the donation at the request of Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Jamie Anderson, who was one of the contestants on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show. Anderson was participating on behalf of Protect Our Winters, which, she said on the show, “brings light and inspiration to climate change.” Still, Trump remained a climate change denier. During the season premier, which aired in early 2015, Trump suggested that New York’s cold weather undermined Gilbert Gottfried’s belief in climate science:

6/17/15

Trump says it’s “madness” to call climate change our “No. 1 problem.” The day after announcing his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where he said he was “not a believer in man-made” warming. He added, “When I hear Obama saying that climate change is the No. 1 problem, it is just madness.”

9/21/15

“I’m not a believer in man-made global warming.” During the GOP primary race, Trump kept up his climate denial. Here he is on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show: “I’m not a believer in man-made global warming. It could be warming, and it’s going to start to cool at some point. And you know, in the early, in the 1920s, people talked about global cooling…They thought the Earth was cooling. Now, it’s global warming…But the problem we have, and if you look at our energy costs, and all of the things that we’re doing to solve a problem that I don’t think in any major fashion exists.”

12/1/15

Trump says it’s “ridiculous” for Obama to pursue the Paris climate agreement. The long-anticipated Paris climate negotiations began barely two weeks after the city was struck by a devastating series of terrorist attacks. As the talks kicked off, Obama called the summit “an act of defiance” against terrorism and urged the world leaders gathered there to agree to an ambitious deal to combat global warming. Trump took to Instagram to express his disapproval. “While the world is in turmoil and falling apart in so many different ways—especially with ISIS—our president is worried about global warming,” he said. “What a ridiculous situation.”

What is Obama thinking?

A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Dec 1, 2015 at 8:12am PST

12/30/15

“A lot of it’s a hoax,” and “I want to use hair spray.” During a campaign speech in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Trump criticized Obama for worrying too much about “the carbon footprint” of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change—an issue that Trump proceeded to conflate with the hole in the ozone layer. “I want to use hair spray,” complained Trump. “They say, ‘Don’t use hair spray, it’s bad for the ozone.’ So I’m sitting in this concealed apartment, this concealed unit…It’s sealed, it’s beautiful. I don’t think anything gets out. And I’m not supposed to be using hair spray?” He then returned to the subject of the climate hoax: “So Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and the—a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, okay? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

1/24/16

Trump says his claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax was a “joke.” At a Democratic debate in January, Bernie Sanders criticized Trump, noting the real estate mogul “believes that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.” Trump responded the next day on Fox News, suggesting that his infamous 2012 tweet was a joke. “I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax,” said Trump, according to PolitiFact. “A lot of people are making a lot of money…And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn’t care less. They have very—you know, their standards are nothing. But they—in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on our business.”

May 2016

Trump wants to build a sea wall to protect his resort from global warming. Politico reported that one of Trump’s golf clubs asked officials in County Clare, Ireland, to approve construction of a sea wall to guard against the dangers of sea level rise and “more frequent storm events.” According to an environmental impact statement submitted with the application, “If the predictions of an increase in sea level rise as a result of global warming prove correct…it is likely that there will be a corresponding increase in coastal erosion rates…In our view, it could reasonably be expected that the rate of sea level rise might become twice of that presently occurring.”

5/5/16

“Trump digs coal.” Shortly after clinching the GOP nomination, Trump traveled to West Virginia, where he was endorsed by the West Virginia Coal Association. At a rally in Charleston, Trump pointed to signs being waved in the crowd. “I see over here: ‘Trump digs coal,'” he said. “That’s true. I do.” Trump promised to bring back coal mining jobs by repealing Obama’s “ridiculous rules and regulations.”

Coal miners wave signs at Trump’s May 5 rally in Charleston, West Virginia. Steve Helber/AP

5/26/16

Trump pledges to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement. In a major speech on energy policy, Trump said that during his first 100 days in office, he would “rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including” his landmark climate regulations, “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement,” and “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs.”

7/26/16

Trump says he “probably” called climate change a “hoax.” In a remarkably odd exchange on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly asked Trump whether it was “true” that he had “called climate change a hoax.” Trump replied that he “might have” done so following the release of the ClimateGate emails. “Yeah, I probably did,” he added. “I see what’s going on.” Trump went on to say that fossil fuels “could have a minor impact” on the climate but “nothing compared to what they’re talking about.”

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
9/26/16

Trump picks leading climate skeptic to run the EPA transition. Hours before Trump’s first debate with Hillary Clinton, word leaked that he had chosen Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute to lead his transition efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell has a long history of opposing efforts to fight climate change; he’s even accused climate scientists of “manipulating and falsifying the data.” As we reported, “Ebell has called…Obama’s Clean Power Plan ‘illegal’ and the Paris Climate Accord a ‘usurpation of the Senate’s authority.’ Any small increase in global temperatures, he has said, is ‘nothing to worry about.'”

9/26/16

Trump denies saying climate change is a Chinese hoax. During the first debate, Clinton noted that Trump “thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.” In response, Trump simply lied. “I did not, I did not,” he said. “I do not say that.” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway later attempted to clarify his position, telling the Huffington Post, “What he has said is, he believes climate change is naturally occurring and is not all man-made.”

11/23/16

Trump has “open mind” on Paris agreement but still thinks scientists are misleading us. In an interview with the New York Times two weeks after his victory, Trump made a number of confusing and contradictory statements about climate science and policy. Asked if he still planned to pull out of the Paris agreement, Trump said, “I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully.” He conceded that there is “some connectivity” between humans and climate change,” adding, “It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies.” He claimed that the “hottest day ever” was in 1898. He said climate is “a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know.” He once again invoked ClimateGate, declaring, “They say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists.” And, apparently in contrast to his request to build a sea wall in Ireland, Trump even speculated that sea level rise would actually improve the Trump National Doral golf course in Florida. (He may be wrong about that.)

11/27/16

Trump’s “default position” is that climate change “is a bunch of bunk.” Following Trump’s confusing New York Times interview, incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus sought to reassure supporters that the president-elect is, in fact, a climate change denier. “As far as this issue on climate change, the only thing he was saying, after being asked a few questions about it, is, ‘Look, I’ll have an open mind about it,'” Priebus explained on Fox. “But he has his default position, which is that most of it is a bunch of bunk. But he’ll have an open mind and listen to people.”

12/1/16

Ivanka Trump “wants to make climate change…one of her signature issues.” According to Politico, a “source close to” Trump’s daughter Ivanka said the first daughter “wants to make climate change—which her father has called a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese—one of her signature issues…The source said Ivanka is in the early stages of exploring how to use her spotlight to speak out on the issue.”

12/5/16

Donald and Ivanka Trump meet with Al Gore.

This story has been updated. Natalie Schreyer contributed to this article.

From: 

Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said About Global Warming

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said About Global Warming

"I Fight Back.” Jonathan Kozol’s Plan to Stop Bigotry in Trump’s America

by ModestoBrickhou Posted on November 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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

As exit poll numbers rolled in and it became clear that the majority of white voters chose Donald Trump despite the bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia that came to define his campaign, I thought about the prescient warnings in the work of education journalist Jonathan Kozol. For nearly 50 years, this educator, author, and civil rights activist sounded the alarm about the damage done to pluralistic democracy by our increasingly polarized education systems. He argued that fewer integrated public schools mean fewer opportunities to learn mutual understanding and collective responsibility, essential qualities for a tolerant democracy. With his landmark New York Times best-sellers—Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, The Shame of the Nation—Kozol shaped a generation of teachers and writers covering schools and inequality.

Our public schools today are more racially segregated than they were shortly after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. White children, in particular, are growing up in homogenized environments, attending schools, on average, where 77 percent of students are white. White kids are also less likely than children of color to interact with students from different racial or ethnic backgrounds in their neighborhoods. Understanding and respecting different communities has to start early, and that becomes more and more unlikely if Americans don’t have daily opportunities to interact and connect with each other, a position Kozol has championed for decades.

A week after the election results, I called Kozol—who describes himself as an “eternal optimist”—to ask what advice he has for parents, teachers, and progressives across the country who want to turn their anxiety over the rise of extremism and bigotry into working toward positive changes in our schools and in our society.

Mother Jones: How is your mood as we enter the beginning of the Trump administration?

Jonathan Kozol: I don’t remain low for too long. I fight back. I went through the moment when Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, and I’ve lived through the moment when Ronald Reagan won in 1980. This is worse, but only by degrees. We’ve never had such overt extremism before—that’s new and scary.

MJ: Do you think that the declines in the amount of time students spend learning social studies, humanities, and civic education—especially in underfunded schools serving working-class, rural, and inner-city students—has contributed to the deep divides and the rise of bigotry in the U.S.?

JK: Yes, it did contribute to what just happened in this country. I’ve been worried about this for many years. The loss of social studies eclipses our memory of historical atrocities; it eclipses our memory of the damage done to social orders by extreme racists and xenophobes.

The humanities at their best, especially fiction and poetry, refine the souls of human beings. They open our hearts to compassion, give a profound sense of human vulnerability, and open our hearts to identifying with those who suffer most. The virtual decapitation of humanities and social studies in our public schools over the past 15 years has, I think, helped to narrow our sense of civic decency, collective responsibility, and moral generosity. I don’t think the decline of social studies and humanities explains the election, but these two factors heightened the distrust between the races and the classes in this country.

MJ: How should our civic education—including social studies and humanities—change to help young people appreciate the fragility of democracy and understand and reject extremism?

JK: I’d give the development of critical consciousness the highest priority right now: Empowering young people to ask discerning questions and to feel that it’s okay to challenge the evils and injustices they perceive. The civic education and engagement is being beaten out of kids by this tremendous emphasis on authoritarian instruction and emphasis on one right answer on the test. We need to empower young people to understand that the most important questions that we face in life have limitless numbers of answers and that some of those answers will be distressing to the status quo.

In teaching history, it’s very important to enable students to recognize the very high toll these extremist, racist values have taken in the past. Not only on Latino and African Americans, which is obvious to us, but in earlier generations to Jews, Italians, and Irish people, among others. The cruelty against children of color is part of an old pattern. The best part of the American story is that we ultimately did welcome all of these minorities to the United States and, in time, we saw how beautifully they enriched the fabric of this country.

It’s also important to avoid giving the impression that history is something that is done by famous people who lived 200 or 2000 years ago. When I speak to students, I always say: ‘History is also something you can do. It’s what you do Monday morning about the ideals and longings you felt the night before. You don’t need to look at history, you can enter it.’

MJ: When we talk about the benefits of integration, the emphasis these days has often been on how students of color can benefit from going to schools with higher test scores. What often gets lost is your longstanding argument that integration offers white children the opportunity to fully develop as human beings and responsible citizens who have skills to integrate multiple perspectives. There is a high cost if white children are spending most of their life segregated from daily interactions with people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds.

JK: That’s right. I don’t think standardized test scores can tell us anything significant about what children are learning. One of the greatest gains made during integration was not something that can be reduced to numbers: mutual understanding and respect for each other. It was simply a much higher, richer, fuller, culturally more capacious quality of education, because kids were in schools with students from other backgrounds, and parents with clout made sure that all kids in the school were receiving a full breadth of learning.

MJ: Given that the Trump campaign signaled its preference to use government funding to expand vouchers and charter schools rather than promote integration, what can progressive parents do if they want to promote stronger democratic values and reduce bigotry in our country?

JK: There are plenty of ways in which privileged people could confront the hyper-segregation of our public schools and the profound residential segregation of this nation. And I would argue that they don’t have the right to use the outcome of this election as an excuse to abdicate their own responsibility. The local districts—especially historically liberal districts that surround major metropolitan areas—have a perfect opportunity to expand the kinds of voluntary integration programs that have thrived for many years in places like Boston. At some point there were 27,000 kids on the waiting list for the voluntary integration program in Boston, even though the program can only admit 400 kids every year. The program is still thriving, because there is still state funding—not enough, but it’s there to cover the significant extra costs: transportation, highly qualified teachers, mentors to students who need extra supports.

Any enlightened metropolitan area could create the same kind of program so long as they can convince their legislators to provide what is ultimately a tiny portion of any state budget to make this happen. But even if parents can’t obtain enough money from the state, most of these districts can easily afford to pump some of their own local property tax wealth into receiving schools to make sure it works in a really good, creative way.

One reason this option hasn’t been on the table is that major media outlets avoid drawing attention to these successful programs. That’s a part of the neoliberal drift—don’t talk about segregation. Let’s instead use the latest, so-called data-based, research-driven, miracle solution to create high-scoring, happy, apartheid schools in America. That’s the agenda.

MJ: What is your advice to dispirited progressives? How can they turn their anger toward meaningful action?

JK: Don’t mourn. Organize. That’s the most important part.

If we are going to build a powerful movement to resist these ugly trends that have swept across the nation, we have to build a movement that can sustain itself after the immediate moment of outrage. It’s not too hard to get tens of thousands of people into the streets to protest Trump’s election. One of the weaknesses of the left has been a reluctance to create any kind of structure that could perpetuate the struggle beyond a single incendiary incident. Obviously, movements have to have a good amount of participatory democracy, but there has to be a way to generate and sustain leadership from the grassroots. I don’t mean a single individual, but a cadre of leadership that can guide us to be wise rebels and bring things to completion.

Sometimes we spend too much time—and I’ve done this for years—testifying to Congress and subcommittee hearings. Congress people pat you on the back and say, “I’m on your side.” Then years go by and nothing happens. Political change on that level never happens unless there is a powerful movement comparable to the Civil Rights Movement that was coordinated by the SNCC the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, CORE Congress of Racial Equality, and SCLC The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. These groups scared the establishment enough where they passed the Civil Rights Act and the war on poverty.

At the government level, I think we need to struggle hard to turn around the Democratic Party into a genuine opposition party that it has to be. I think we should move the party in the direction charted out by Elizabeth Warren and resist gravitating to the innocuous center of the spectrum, which the party has been doing for the past 30 years. Bush, Obama, Clinton didn’t do a single thing to deal with the sweeping segregation of our public schools.

We have to struggle hard to make sure that the Democratic party upholds a truly bold vision of what a noble society should be and not just tinker around the edges of injustice. I am convinced that I will live long enough to see that happen.

Source: 

"I Fight Back.” Jonathan Kozol’s Plan to Stop Bigotry in Trump’s America

Posted in bigo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "I Fight Back.” Jonathan Kozol’s Plan to Stop Bigotry in Trump’s America

Are GPS Apps Messing With Our Brains?

by christopherprout Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

Måns Swanberg

About 15 years ago, anthropologist Claudio Aporta and philosopher Eric Higgs traveled to Igloolik, a remote island in far northeast Canada, to answer an intriguing question: How might newly introduced GPS devices affect the island’s Inuit hunters, who possessed some of the sharpest wayfinding skills on Earth?

You don’t want to get lost on Igloolik. The proximity of magnetic north makes compasses fickle. The land can appear utterly featureless, especially in winter, when the cold—like a cat watching a mouse, “waiting patiently to see if he would make a mistake,” as explorer R.M. Patterson once put it—can make the smallest mishap fatal. During the summer, when Inuit hunters stalk walrus by boat, sea fog can close so tight around a vessel that anyone lacking GPS must drop anchor, lest they run aground, or steer out to sea and risk running out of fuel.

To navigate this murk, Igloolik’s hunters had long attended closely to not just stars and landmarks, but patterns of wind, snowdrift, current, animal behavior, and light. They read as much in the wind’s snow sculptures as Polynesian sailors read in constellations and tides. They had no formal training and rarely used paper maps. Yet the best hunters carried in their heads extraordinarily intricate maps of the landscape, constructed through decades of experience and tutelage. During a break in travel, a veteran hunter might ask novices to describe the location of a place, and nudge his protégés along as they worked out the problem aloud. This was easier when the Inuit traveled by dogsled—no engine noise—but it still happens in the snow-machine age.

Like the snowmobile, GPS offered the hunters irresistible advantages. They could travel more safely through terrestrial whiteouts or ocean fog. If a snowmobile conked out or a hunting party had to stash food or equipment, GPS made it easy to mark the spot and find it later. And the hunters always knew the way home. But within a few short years, as Aporta and Higgs documented, the GPS units revealed some sharp limitations. In winter, the batteries quickly failed unless the devices were kept against the body under much clothing. The units themselves were devilishly hard to operate with gloves or mittens, and their screens iced over in seconds.

Worse, GPS was leading young hunters into mortal danger. Some followed straight-line tracks onto thin ice and fell through. Others, when their devices failed, couldn’t read the snow or recognize traditional landmarks. After several near-fatal and fatal incidents, the villagers created a program to integrate GPS with traditional wayfinding. Knowing the technology was here to stay, the Igloolik Inuit wanted to make sure they could harness its advantages without literally losing their way.

An extreme example? Well, no. We mainlanders are getting into far more trouble with GPS than the Igloo­lik people ever have. Particularly in the car-addicted, smartphone-­besotted United States, the last 15 years have produced a daunting database of disasters wherein people navigating with tiny screens drive directly into danger, destruction, and death.

In Bedford, New York, in 2008, a rental car driver fixated on his GPS unit barely escaped being hit by a train. Other people have driven into lakes and oceans. Countless truckers attending to GPS while ignoring sign­age have smashed into overpasses or become wedged beneath them—in 2009, the New York State Department of Transportation blamed GPS as a factor in more than 80 percent of such incidents. That same year, a Death Valley tourist followed her GPS down an increasingly remote road until her Jeep got stuck in the sand. She survived the searing heat for a week; her six-year-old son did not. In his book Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, author Greg Milner relates how, in March 2015, yet another GPS-smitten driver ignored cones, signs, “and other deterrents” warning him away from a closed bridge. His vehicle plunged 40 feet and burst into flames. The man escaped. His wife died. “Something,” Milner writes, “is happening to us.”

We’re becoming navigational idiots. The problem isn’t GPS itself. The Global Positioning System, which uses a constellation of satellites to determine one’s location on the globe, is just a way of fixing points on a map. Rather, the problem is how smartphone apps such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze display our routes. Because these apps seek primarily to direct us efficiently from A to B, their default presentation is a landscape somewhere between minimalist and impoverished—typically a fat colored line (your route) running through a largely featureless void. Mappers call this goal-oriented perspective” egocentric.” It’s all about you.

Paper maps, by contrast, use an “allocentric” presentation—one that forces you to plan and frame your route within a meaningful context: towns, forts, universities, parks, and natural features named for local heroes and history (such as Lake Champlain and Smugglers’ Notch in my home state of Vermont), distinctive shapes (Camel’s Hump), or local flora and fauna. (The Winooski River, which flows through my town, gets its name from the Abenaki word for the wild onion that grows on its banks.) Such maps bear a rough but essential resemblance to the mental map locals carry in their heads.

Display size allowing, a digital map can also show such context. Google Earth does so beautifully. Even your Google Maps smartphone app will display many details of the surroundings, albeit on a small scale, when you’re not in navigation mode. But enter in a destination and the context vanishes. The landscape is cleansed of distracting features and the map spins so that the top of your phone is not north, but whichever direction you happen to be traveling. You’ve just turned an allocentric world egocentric.

The distinction between these two wayfinding modes interests not just mapmakers, but neuroscientists, for each draws upon a distinctive neural network to understand space and move us through it. Your phone’s default egocentric (or “cue-based”) mode is the domain of the caudate nucleus, a looping, snake-shaped structure that is heavily involved in movement and closely tied to areas of the brain that respond to simple rewards. Navigating by map—often called a cognitive mapping strategy because it builds and draws on the map in your head—primarily uses the hippocampus, an area in the center of the brain crucial to spatial memory, autobiographical memory, and our ability to ponder the future.

While most of us favor one or the other of these navigational strategies, both are required; lose either and you’ll soon lose your way. You enlist the caudate’s cue-based mode, for instance, when your friend Jane tells you to take Exit 8, go left on Route 12, turn right about two miles later at the red church, and hers is the fifth house on the right. With decent directions, the method is idiotproof. But it doesn’t really tie into any deeper mental map.

You’ll fire up your hippocampus, though, if Jane mails you a road map with an X marking her house. You’ll need to understand the map well enough to plot your route, and memorize it well enough to make the drive. Studying a map “is difficult, it’s complicated, it’s demanding,” says Veronique Bohbot, who investigates the neuroscience of navigation at McGill University in Montreal. Yet it’s ultimately more versatile and powerful because it provides a richer framework for social, historical, and practical information. In return for your efforts, it lets you improvise, create shortcuts, and, should you get lost, reorient yourself.

Some years ago, Matt Wilson and another scientist at the University of Arizona discovered that by wiring up special neurons, called place cells, in a rat’s hippocampus, they could observe how the animal builds a mental map as it navigates a maze.

As the rat learns a desired route (ending with a treat), some of its place cells begin firing at recognized locations—landmarks or intersections where it needs to turn. After the rat completes a route, Wilson discovered, its place cells replay the route backward, and later forward again—this process continues in the rodent’s dreams as it consolidates the memories of its daily explorations. After mastering several routes in a maze—home to point A, home to point B, home to point C—the rat can improvise routes from C to A or A to B without returning to the start. Bingo: a cognitive map.

We humans appear to do something similar. Say you travel to an unfamiliar city but forget your smartphone. The first night, the hotel clerk gives you directions to a restaurant with a sinfully rich chocolate mousse. The next day, she points you to a park by the river. On the third, to a museum. Each day, absorbing visual cues and landmarks, you develop and refine a sense of geo­graphy and direction. On the fourth day, your love interest arrives. You walk to the museum, and when the two of you emerge, ravenous, you realize that if you cut over a block and walk north a few more, you should find the river, and then, walking east-ish between river and park, that wonderful restaurant. “The one with the sinful mousse?” your companion inquires, eyebrow raised. You nod. Bingo: a cognitive map with benefits.

Now think. Had you relied on Google Maps instead, you’d have absorbed less of the terrain, built a lame cognitive map, gotten lost when your battery died, missed the restaurant, and left your partner parched and peckish.

Small potatoes, maybe—but they get bigger. Bohbot, the McGill researcher, believes we may be actively making ourselves stupid by leaning too heavily on smartphone navigation.

How so? For starters, notes University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Russell Epstein, a leading spatial cognition researcher, we know that followers of cue-based routes have more active caudates than mappers do. We also know that the volume of gray matter in the hippocampi of English cabbies increases as they memorize the streets of central London—a.k.a. “the knowledge”—a longtime requirement for a taxi license.

This raises a question: Might overreliance on our phone apps’ egocentric navigational systems atrophy the hippocampus? Based on limited animal studies and her ongoing work in humans, Bohbot suspects so. And this concerns her, because people with smaller hippocampi stand at greater risk of memory loss, Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And, of course, getting lost.

So even if you don’t hunt walrus or do much backwoods hiking, it makes sense to protect your ability to wayfind. To that end, I offer a tactic and a strategy. The tactic: Bring back North. You can redirect most smartphone navigation apps to align with the magnetic compass instead of your direction of travel. Doing so forces you to orient yourself to the real world, rather than indulge in the egocentric convenience of having it spin beneath you every time you turn.

The broader strategy comes from Yale historian Bill Rankin, whose book, After the Map, charts the rise of GPS. Rankin says he finds it helpful to distinguish between “coordination” (just get me there), for which a simple route suffices, and “familiarity,” for which a cognitive map serves best.

Coordination, Rankin notes, is why the military developed global positioning to begin with: It’s just the thing when you want to put a cruise missile into a bunker or supplies into a storm-struck village. But truly knowing a place means mastering its landscape, and for that you need a cognitive map. As an undergrad in Houston, Rankin began marking his favorite jogging routes on a paper map pinned on his wall. He stayed in shape and learned the town in the process. Know why you’re traveling, he advises, and choose your navigation mode accordingly.

View original:  

Are GPS Apps Messing With Our Brains?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are GPS Apps Messing With Our Brains?

Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?

by KatherineUbc Posted on November 17, 2016

Many have agreed that President-elect Donald Trump has some questionable ideas when it comes to climate policy. Today, we get to add anthropomorphized gym sock O’Reilly and known cup goblin Starbucks to that list!

On Wednesday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he advised Trump on a number of items to consider as he prepares to take office. On this list:

“Finally, President-Elect Trump should accept the Paris treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas. It doesn’t really amount to much anyway, let it go.”

Well, the thing is, it does actually amount to a lot.

Here’s a confusing screenshot, because this action item appears under the heading “What President Obama Failed to Do,” when President Obama did, in fact, succeed in accepting the Paris Agreement.

On Thursday morning, a coalition of 365 major companies and investors submitted a plea to Trump to please, come on, just support the goddamn Paris Agreement, because to do otherwise would be a disastrous blow to the United States’ economic competitiveness. The list includes Starbucks (the nerve!!!!), eBay, Kellogg, and Virgin.

Anyway, Trump’s whole “refusing to acknowledge climate change” thing seems like a bad look.

See the original article here:  

Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Badger, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?