Category Archives: Mop

Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Family Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

by OlenMcgehee Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, a Syrian family of three on their way to the United States received an unexpected surprise: their long-awaited resettlement to Indiana was, with less than 24 hours to go, being shifted to Connecticut, because Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had demanded that no Syrian refugees be allowed into his state.

The case got widespread national attention as a symbol of the backlash against Syrian refugees following last week’s terror attacks in Paris. But nonprofit groups that help resettle refugees across the country say the case wasn’t a sign of things to come, but a one-off that won’t be repeated.

“We’re not going to capitulate to this,” says Carleen Miller, executive director of Exodus Refugee Immigration, the Indianapolis resettlement organization that was handling the Syrian family’s case. “We intend to resettle Syrians.” Wendy Johnson, the communications director for Episcopal Migration Ministries, the national group that works with Exodus, was equally firm. “The case in Indiana was a one-time occurrence,” she remarks.

Miller says Pence’s gambit worked because of short notice. Her office received a letter from the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration on Tuesday saying the state wouldn’t provide resettlement funds for Syrian refugees. Those dollars help pay for a variety of services, including English classes, counseling, and food assistance. By the time the letter arrived, the family was on its way to the United States, and Miller says she didn’t have time to scramble for other resources. “The decision I made to redirect the family to Connecticut was because the family was coming in less than 24 hours and all this had erupted, and nobody told me what the governor could or couldn’t do that would disrupt services or benefits to the client,” she says. Rather than giving the family an uncertain welcome, she chose to send them to another destination where resources were fully available.

If a resettlement group has more time to prepare, it can find private money to make up for state aid that is taken away, Miller explains. She adds, “That’s what we need to know, that families will be welcomed by us and that we’ll have the resources to provide what they need.”

Officials at resettlement agencies haven’t yet received definitive word on what state governors can actually do to prevent refugees, but they insist that moves by Pence and other governors who have refused Syrian refugees are illegal on several counts. “If this was to be implemented, we’re going to be in default of our international covenants,” says Erol Kekic of Church World Service, a resettlement agency. “Article 31 in the UN refugee convention basically says we can’t discriminate based on nationality or membership in a particular religious group, and this is exactly what we’re doing.”

Even the supposed state refugee funds that governors control aren’t strictly theirs to manage: States receive that money from the federal government. The cash is typically doled out by a state refugee coordinator, but that’s not mandatory. “It’s actually at the discretion of the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the Department of Health and Human Services to decide who administers these funds,” Kekic says. “They’re not state funds.”

This Syrian family’s quick shift to Connecticut was motivated by logistics and not a fear of local backlash, according to refugee advocates, but that doesn’t mean refugees feel safe. Resettlement agencies say their local offices have fielded numerous calls from nervous refugee families and have also received reports of harassment. Carleen Miller of Exodus reports that one Syrian refugee family in Indiana expressed concern about the signal conveyed by Pence’s move. At school, the couple’s child was confronted by another student. “The classmate said, ‘Are you a supporter of ISIS?’…It’s really disturbing on a variety of levels.” Another refugee in Louisville, Kentucky, reported a death threat. “We have had one report of a Middle Eastern client…getting off the bus and somebody yelling, ‘I will kill you!'” says Kekic, from Church World Service. “So the guy went home and shaved his beard and cried, and then called the agency to say, ‘I don’t know what to think anymore. I didn’t do anything to anyone. Here I am, what do I do next?'” Local resettlement offices have also received threats, Kekic points out.

Many refugee families now live in a constant state of tension, according to resettlement officials. “They feel afraid, they’re not sure what to do, they don’t know if they belong there anymore, how should they behave,” Johnson say. But refugee assistance groups also note that local communities have mostly been welcoming.

In Connecticut, the Syrian family of three—they have so far declined to give their names to media outlets—arrived in New Haven on Wednesday and was greeted by Democratic Gov. Daniel Malloy, one of the few politicians to publicly welcome Syrian refugees in the past week. “Americans sometimes overreact to issues, but in the end they come back and find center,” he reassured the family, according to Chris George, the executive director of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, the group that inherited the case from Exodus.

Then, after Malloy left, the family prepared for their first night in their new homeland.

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Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Family Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

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Meet the Guy Behind Your Favorite Rock ‘n’ Roll Songs

by DemetriHmi Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Various Artists
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll
Yep Roc

“Invented” might be a slight exaggeration, but Memphis, Tennessee’s Sam Phillips discovered and/or produced some of the greatest voices in blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, releasing many of them on his own Sun Records label. This wonderful 55-track compilation illustrates the staggering range of electrifying music he midwifed, from Elvis Presley (“Mystery Train”) and Jerry Lee Lewis (“Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On”), to Howlin’ Wolf (“How Many More Years?”) and B.B. King (“She’s Dynamite”), to Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”) and Johnny Cash (“Big River”). Not to mention Roy Orbison, Ike Turner, Junior Parker, Charlie Rich, and many other lesser-known but vital performers. For newcomers, this is the perfect introduction to an essential body of work; for everyone else, it’s merely a thoroughly satisfying collection.

Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll was compiled by journalist Peter Guralnick as a companion piece to his absorbing new book of the same name (to be published November 10 by Little, Brown, and Company). The author of the best biography of Elvis Presley to date, as well as a host of other excellent studies of American roots music, Guralnick is a captivating enthusiast and exhaustive researcher, who never lets a mastery of the facts obscure the visceral thrill of the art he celebrates. At 600 pages, his thoughtful account of Phillips’ complex life is not for the casual reader, but it’s hard to put down once you get started.

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Meet the Guy Behind Your Favorite Rock ‘n’ Roll Songs

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One State Finally Cracked Down on Deceptive Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers

by QWCJaydentx Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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California on Friday became the only state to target anti-abortion pregnancy centers with a law cracking down on deceptive practices some have used to prevent or dissuade women from having an abortion.

The new law, which forces some crisis pregnancy centers to offer information about public assistance for reproductive services and others to notify patients that there are no medical professionals on staff, passed the California state assembly with a large majority in late May. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed the bill on Friday night.

It is the first time reproductive rights groups have succeeded in pushing regulations on crisis pregnancy centers across an entire state; only a handful of cities or counties have passed similar laws. Shortly before the act became law, Amy Everitt, the director of NARAL Pro-Choice California, a reproductive rights group that helped draft the bill, said in an interview, “There is more to come.”

But the new law may represent the outer limit of what legislatures can do to regulate crisis pregnancy centers. The measure, called AB 775, almost certainly faces the same fraught legal battles that stalled similar regulations in cities including Baltimore, New York, and Austin. Those battles forced NARAL and its allies to be conservative in crafting the new regulations. For instance, the law cannot force unlicensed centers to inform women that the state health department encourages women to visit licensed medical providers for prenatal care. A new court fight could erode their options even further.

Reproductive rights advocates and public health officials have long sought to raise alarms about crisis pregnancy centers. Run by anti-abortion groups, crisis pregnancy centers sometimes provide pregnant women with misleading medical information in order to discourage them from ending their pregnancies. Others are ambiguous about whether they perform abortions or not in order to get women through the door. According to an investigation by NARAL, almost half of California’s crisis pregnancy centers promulgate the popular anti-abortion myth that terminating a pregnancy is linked to a patient’s chances of developing breast cancer. At the same time, NARAL claims, a majority of the state’s crisis pregnancy centers present themselves as neutral on the issue of abortion.

Abortion foes deny that crisis pregnancy centers engage in such subterfuge. “A woman knows her options,” says Sandra Palacios, a government relations executive with the California Catholic Conference, which opposed the law. “Women are smart. They know where they’re walking into—a safe place where they can get all the information about abortion alternatives.”

But as AB 775 was debated in the general assembly, many California medical professionals complained that crisis pregnancy centers offered their patients health care of dubious quality. In a letter to the legislature, Therese McCluskey, the perinatal services coordinator for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said many patients who transfer from crisis pregnancy centers to the clinics she oversees come without prenatal records, lab reports, or the pregnancy verification form that entitles them to pregnancy-related health care. Patients typically transfer at the point when they are too far along in their pregnancy to obtain an abortion.

At a Senate hearing on the bill, one OB-GYN testified that crisis pregnancy centers can pose a risk even for women who wanted to be pregnant and planned to carry their pregnancies full term. Sally Greenwald, of the University of California—San Francisco, is an OB-GYN and recalled taking over the care of a pregnant diabetic woman from a pro-life center. The crisis pregnancy center had failed to treat the woman’s alarming blood sugar levels. “The fetus was exposed to lifelong risks, such as cardiac malformations, brain anomalies, and spine deformations,” says Greenwald. “We could have lowered the sugar in her blood and we could have had better outcomes both for mom and for baby.”

There are nearly 170 crisis pregnancy centers in California. At least 40 percent of them are licensed by the state as medical providers. Unlicensed clinics are prohibited from providing medical advice. For instance, an unlicensed clinic could conduct an ultrasound for a woman, but it could not use the results to determine gestational age.

California’s new law places two types of restrictions on crisis pregnancy centers. It requires pregnancy-related service providers that are not medically licensed to disclose that fact to patients. For reproductive health clinics, including crisis pregnancy centers, that are licensed, the law requires that they provide patients with information about California’s financial assistance for family planning services, prenatal care, and abortion.

“This bill is sort of a lessons-learned bill from all the previous efforts,” says Everitt, of NARAL. As the group and its allies crafted the bill, she adds, they were “acutely aware” of how other bills to regulate crisis pregnancy centers—including some NARAL helped author—had failed in the past.

At the center of those past failures is a feud over whether abortion is a political or a health issue. Abortion foes claim that regulating crisis pregnancy centers is a violation of their right to express opposition to abortion. Reproductive rights advocates counter that the regulations are permissible because states have some latitude to regulate speech that is deceptive or coming from professionals licensed by the state. What is at stake is more than semantics: Supreme Court decisions have set a high bar for regulating political speech, but a low bar when it comes to individuals who are speaking as licensed professionals.

Regulating crisis pregnancy centers, even in blue states, has proved an elusive goal. Federal courts have struck down several laws forcing crisis pregnancy centers to make certain disclosures, such as informing women that they do not offer abortions, birth control, or referrals for those services.

Local officials in Baltimore, New York City, Austin, Maryland’s Montgomery County, and San Francisco have all attempted to regulate crisis pregnancy centers with mixed degrees of success. Federal courts are split over several laws forcing crisis pregnancy centers to disclose up front that they are not medically licensed or do not refer for abortion, and to specify which medical services they do or do not provide.

Attempting to avoid a similar outcome in California, Everitt says, NARAL enlisted the office of Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris. Harris’ office helped draft the bill from its inception with an eye toward eliminating openings for a First Amendment challenge—although a spokeswoman for Harris cautioned that the state’s involvement was no guarantee of success. Harris vocally backed the new law.

Their track record in federal court forced the drafters to leave what they saw as large holes in the new law. “We wish we could get crisis pregnancy centers to stop spreading scientifically unsound messages,” Everitt says, but such a law would likely be struck down in court.

Palacios said the California Catholic Conference intends to sue to block the law. A representative for a coalition of crisis pregnancy centers opposed to the bill did not respond to requests for an interview.

Everitt is confident the law would survive a court challenge. Her group was instrumental in drafting the San Francisco measure, passed in 2011, which has so far survived a legal onslaught. The law allowed the city to fine crisis pregnancy centers each time they falsely implied that they offered abortion services or referrals.

Just as she did in 2011, Everitt hopes the new law will become a national model, especially now that the umbrella organizations behind many crisis pregnancy centers push their affiliates to seek more medical licensing. Crisis pregnancy centers say it is a move to provide better care to women.

NARAL sees crisis pregnancy centers’ push for more licensing as a grab for legitimacy—and a tactical error. “The more there’s a relationship with the state, the more you have leeway to regulate crisis pregnancy centers,” says Rebecca Griffin, an assistant director for NARAL in California. “It’s an opportunity for us.”

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One State Finally Cracked Down on Deceptive Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers

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Country-Rocker Corb Lund Shows Off His Wit and High-Lonesome Voice

by RefugioBathurst Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Corb Lund
Things That Can’t Be Undone
New West

With his flexible, high-lonesome voice and witty songs, Corb Lund makes records that have real staying power. On Things That Can’t Be Undone, his first studio outing in three years, the Canadian country-rocker and his nimble supporting trio, the Hurtin’ Albertans, dispatch sizzling boogie rave-ups and heart-tugging ballads equally well, uncorking a batch of snappy tunes bigger names would be smart to cover. Among the high points: “Weight of the Gun,” a loping tale of regret in the spirit of vintage Johnny Cash, “Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues,” a hilarious unofficial sequel to Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” and the haunting war story “Sadr City.” Then again, there’s not a dull or false note to be found on this remarkable and rewarding album.

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Country-Rocker Corb Lund Shows Off His Wit and High-Lonesome Voice

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Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

by SungKincheloe2 Posted on October 5, 2015

Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

By on 5 Oct 2015commentsShare

Polystyrene foam, aka the devil’s clamshell, aka the indestructible insulator, aka green public enemy No. 1 (or maybe 500 — environmentalists have a lot of enemies), may have finally met its match: mealworms. (Polystyrene and “Styrofoam” are regularly — and incorrectly — used interchangeably. Styrofoam is a kind of polystyrene, but not the kind you’re thinking of.)

That’s right. It turns out, those squirmy little grubs are more than just a hot menu item for entomophagy enthusiasts. They, too, have quite an appetite, and according to the Environmental News Network (ENN), that appetite happens to include Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene:

While this diet doesn’t sound remotely healthy for the worms, researchers have yet to identify any adverse effects. In comparison studies, mealworms that ate exclusively Styrofoam were equally as healthy as those that ate a more standard diet of bran. Researchers are currently in the process of verifying that families of worms that consume only plastic are still healthy generations from now. Additionally, they want to confirm that predators that eat mealworms remain healthy after consuming worms that eat Styrofoam.

Styrofoam and other polystyrene foam are poisonous to a lot of animals, so mealworms’ ability to digest them came as quite a surprise to scientists. “There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” Stanford researcher Craig Criddle said in a press release. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.”

Half of the Styrofoam that mealworms eat turns into carbon dioxide, but half of whatever mealworms usually eat turns into carbon dioxide, ENN reports. The other half of the Styrofoam turns into “non-toxic poop pellets” that are safe to use as fertilizer. So as long as the mealworms remain healthy, and everything that eats the mealworms remains healthy, then this seems like a win-win-win.

Still, we’re not about to have a bunch of mealworm factories breaking down all the world’s polystyrene into piles and piles of poop pellets. One hundred mealworm can only eat between 35 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam in a day, according to the press release. That means it would take thousands of mealworms to eat through just a penny’s weight of the stuff.

The real benefit of this research will come when scientists figure out what combination of gut bacteria give mealworms this ability to digest what we humans find so difficult to break down in a cheap and efficient way. Maybe then we’ll be able create giant mealworm gut factories that do break Styrofoam down into piles and piles of poop pellets!

But that’s just the beginning. Criddle and his colleagues also plan to look at whether mealworms and other insects can digest other kinds of plastics, including microbeads and polypropylene — a material commonly used in textiles and car components.

In the mean time, hip entomophagists take note: For your next underground supper club, consider serving polystyrene-fed mealworm tacos with a side of cricket fries and ant salad. Just remember: Skip the home-brewed beer — you don’t want alcohol clouding the natural high that your diners will get from eating a (questionably) sustainable protein source and ridding the Earth of the devil’s clamshell.

Source:

Could Mealworms Help Solve our Styrofoam Waste Problem?

, Environmental News Network.

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover

, Stanford University.

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Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

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We Finally Got Around to Ryan Adams’ "1989." Here Are Our Instant Reactions to Every Track.

by GeorginDeluna Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Earlier this week, I suggested to our own Ben Dreyfuss that he take a stab at reviewing Ryan Adams’ new adaptation of Taylor Swift’s hit album 1989. Given the chat that Ben and colleague James West published when Swift’s version dropped last October, I figured it was a no-brainer. (I also didn’t necessarily think that I’d be the only one around when it came time to edit it.) Anyway, Ben agreed, and he enlisted Tim McDonnell to tag-team the review, by which I mean chat semi-coherently for what must have been hours.

TRACK 1: “WELCOME TO NEW YORK“

Ben Dreyfuss: Here we go.

Tim McDonnell: Seagulls. We’re on an island.

BD: Welcome to New York.

TM: How can you not like this?

BD: It sounds like a theme song to an ’80s sitcom?

TM: I would watch that sitcom. Every episode.

BD: This really does sort of sound like he is stylizing, like, what’s his name from New Jersey? The Boss? Springsteen!

TM: Descending into the Port Authority from New Jersey to fulfill all your dreams.

BD: I bet he was like “Jersey? That’s basically New York. Let’s go with Springsteen.” Chris Christie would love this cover.

TM: Fist-pumping. Watch for this song at future Christie events. So…better than Tay?

BD: No. I mean, look…no.

TM: Or are we just going with the baseline that none of it is better than Tay?

TRACK 2: “BLANK SPACE”

BD: I hate this.

TM: This is definitely the mopey part.

BD: He is such a whiny bitch. I mean, he is SUCH a little crybaby.

TM: I kind of love it. It’s like he’s sitting in your living room playing right to you.

BD: He is the paradigm of a sad little white hipster guitarist.

TM: Okay, but this is actually a pretty sad song. You wouldn’t really know that from the Tay version. There’s so much implied loneliness.

BD: I feel like we’re on a roof after a cast party, and he is trying to find the courage to tell the girl who played opposite him in Skin of Our Teeth that not only is he not gay…he’s actually in love with her.

TM: Tinged with optimism and hope. Also, the reference to old lovers thinking you’re insane.

BD: “If the high was worth the pain.” Babe, it’s always worth the pain.

TM: They’ll tell you I’m insane. BUT I’M NOT OR MAYBE…

BD: “I’M NOT FUCKING INSANE, OKAY? PLEASE BELIEVE ME!”

TM: “I don’t know! Maybe I am! Let’s make out.”

BD: Then you play this sad song in the bathroom and call the therapist in the morning.

TRACK 3: “STYLE”

BD: Yeah, this is different. This is less whiny.

TM: This is very like tech rock—like, I don’t know. Flaming Lips or something.

BD: I like the bass line.

TM: This is what you hear coming from the second-best stage at the music festival, while you’re trying to watch the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

BD: The band that is better than most of them, but still only forgettable.

TM: Not quite good enough for the main stage, but good enough to forget yourself and just dance.

BD: His voice is so weak and sad. I bet Ryan Adams was the dude in college who wrote his feelings into lyrics in a Moleskin.

TRACK 4: “OUT OF THE WOODS”

TM: Okay, now we’re like at the bluegrass festival. Playing at the bandshell in the town square with your mom.

BD: Just an acoustic, a mic, and a few hundred friends in a park in Tennessee. The Town Square Open Mic! And your mom is way too enthusiastic. She’s embarrassing you.

TM: That’s like Ryan Adams’ birthplace probably. He was probably conceived at an open mic.

BD: Can we talk about his voice? It’s so whiny.

TM: It would be better without all the reverb.

BD: Why is it so weak and sad? Maybe he should smoke.

TM: All the indie bands are like obsessed with vocal reverb these days.

BD: I mean, he shouldn’t smoke. Don’t smoke, kids.

TM: No, but he should.

BD: It would make his voice gruffer and sexier.

TM: Smoke more and cut the reverb. Okay, what about the whole concept of this album? What do we think about rewriting whole albums?

BD: The Larger Story™. At first I was turned off by the idea.

TM: Especially for an album that just came out.

BD: One song is one thing, but doing a whole album feels like a purposeless re-creation, but I think I was maybe being too conservative. Like, I can see someone doing interesting things with it. Like imagine Fiona Apple redoing a Chili Peppers album. I mean, that sounds terrible.

TM: Is there a threshold of how much different it has to be to make it worthwhile?

BD: There must be a threshold, or else it’s just masturbatory photocopying.

TM: I like how we just completely tuned out the rest of that song. It was putting me to sleep anyway.

BD: Yeah, I hated it. It went on forever.

TRACK 5: “ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS STAY”

BD: WHO IS THE FAMOUS SINGER HE SOUNDS LIKE? Is it Springsteen?

TM: Kind of. The Springsteen purists would probably not appreciate that comparison. There are other comparisons that are probably better.

BD: Sorry, Springsteen fans. This sounds like it would be perfect at Giants Stadium. Chris Christie is losing himself in a press box. Should we talk about the pronoun changes? Some people had a little cry about it.

TM: Like when boys sing songs that were originally sung by girls.

BD: Their problem was that he changed the pronouns to “she” instead of “he” or whatever. I think it’s a silly criticism. Like it would be really noticeable if he didn’t change them, and that would in and of itself be a statement, which is maybe good or maybe bad. But clearly one he didn’t want to make and that is his right—the right to abstain.

TRACK 6: “SHAKE IT OFF”

BD: Tay’s version is perfect. Perfect pop song.

TM: Carved from a solid block of pop music viral marble.

BD: Birthed from the head of Zeus, the content creator.

TM: This version is more hedged. He doesn’t actually sound like he’s going to shake it off.

BD: He needs to shake it off. But he sounds like actually he is going to die. He is drinking too much and being angry.

TM: He’s repeating the mantra his therapist fed him. “Shake it off.” But he totally doesn’t buy it.

BD: He is going to get in a fistfight outside a bar, get his ass kicked, get in his truck, drive drunk, and kill a bunch of people. SERENITY NOW!

TM: Shake THAT off. Maybe this is what he’s singing immediately after doing that. That’s what it sounds like.

BD: “Sorry, Mr. Adams, you can’t shake off 5-0.”

TM: “Haters gonna hate.”

BD: “I am not a hater. I am a judge. You killed five people.”

TM: Yeah, he is totally unconvinced of his ability to shake it off.

TRACK 7: “I WISH YOU WOULD”

BD: Oh, another acoustic guitar.

TM: The thing with all of these is that he doesn’t really sound like he’s buying the message.

BD: Yeah, that’s a good point.

TM: Tay works because you believe her. She makes you believe her. She is in that car. She is driving straight ahead. That’s why the songs work.

BD: He’s covering her songs in the sense that he’s singing the lyrics, but he’s not playing the part.

TM: You take the same lyrics and put them in Ryan’s mouth and they don’t really add up. I don’t know what he’s standing for.

BD: My main problem with this album is that like it isn’t fun. It sounds like something you would listen to while being overly dramatic about a breakup.

TM: While riding on a train in Europe with like rain streaking down the windows.

BD: YES. He is looking out of the Eurorail, watching Prague go by in an instant, thinking of…

TM: And drinking a whole bottle of wine by himself.

BD: …some girl.

TRACK 8: “BAD BLOOD”

BD: Taylor was writing about Katy Perry. Who do we think Ryan is thinking of while singing this?

TM: Taylor.

BD: AHHAHAHHAHA. I love that.

TM: Wasn’t he married to someone?

BD: Is he the Ryan Adams who created Glee?

TM: Mandy Moore.

BD: She got left behind the aughts with Gossip Girl and James Frey.

TM: “Mandy Moore confirms Ryan Adams split.”

BD: Divorce isn’t very fun.

TM: This album isn’t very fun! I mean, it’s not meant to be fun, I guess.

BD: This album is like something you won’t object to, but it isn’t aiming to win you over. It strives only not to be turned off.

TM: And it’s probably wrong to compare it Tay’s version. It’s its own thing.

BD: But you can’t not compare it. You gotta dance with the one who brung you.

TRACK 9: “WILDEST DREAMS”

BD: So I was at a Taylor Swift-themed SoulCycle last night.

TM: Oh God. Here we go.

BD: And at the end during the stretching they played one of these, and after I walked out, I couldn’t remember what song it was. It just sounded like every other one of his covers.

TM: See, this one kind of works because it’s sort of nostalgic and sad.

BD: Like he’s just reading the words, changing the pronouns, and strumming his dumb acoustic guitar. He sounds like Monsters of Folk. I don’t believe him that it is getting good now. I don’t believe that he knows she’s “so tall.” “SIR, SIR, have you even seen this woman?”

TM: Only from a distance. Restraining order, you know.

BD: Through a telescopic lens. Yeah, I mean, I do feel like this is Songs for the Socially Estranged.

TM: Most of Tay’s songs sound very similar, too, and there’s not a whole lot going on musically, but they’re so fun because she sells the dream.

BD: Tay does the thing where she tries to appeal to every sort of young-adult scenario. Whatever your personal drama in high school is, Taylor has a song for it. This seems all made for the kid who is an emo cutter.

TM: If you strip away the fun, the songs start to fall apart. Tay is good because of Tay.

BD: That’s so true. You can’t strip fun from pop songs, because pop songs are just fantasy nonsense that exist to be fun.

TM: Of course, that would be the message Ryan is trying to telegraph.

TRACK 10: “HOW YOU GET THE GIRL”

BD: His voice is less weak and pathetic here.

TM: But does this sound like he’s getting the girl? No.

BD: No. He sounds upset. He considers this therapy.

TM: This sounds like the girl went home with the jock after prom. After he caught them making out in the bathroom.

BD: Exactly, and now he’s sitting alone on the hood of his car crying in a canyon somewhere, drinking cheap whiskey, playing for whom? He and God and her. Always her. It’s all for her, but then, in reality, he didn’t even love her. He loved the idea of her.

TM: And imagining another life that doesn’t have to be like this.

BD: Thinking that he can’t imagine who he would be had he not had their moments. But what moments did they really have?

TRACK 11: “THIS LOVE”

BD: Ugh. Piano. “My name is Ryan. I can play the piano.”

TM: I think the ones I like more are the more rock and roll ones. There’s a very fine line here between nice music and just falling asleep. I’m already nodding off to this one.

BD: Why did he do this? He must have spent at least some time thinking about this.

TM: Do you think people tried to talk him out of it? “Oh, cool idea…What else are you working on?…Oh, you were serious?”

BD: “Look, Ryan, I like you. I love you. Ryan, I’m your sister. I support you. But this is not a fight you can win.”

TM: “Record it? Like, in a studio?”

BD: “I mean, if you want me to Periscope one song, okay, but…”

TM: “You want the label to pay for this?”

BD: “Have you had a stroke?”

TM: “Look, we know you’re beat up about Mandy.”

BD: “There are other fish in the sea.”

TRACK 12: “I KNOW PLACES”

TM: I like this one. It’s at least different.

BD: The beat is better immediately.

TM: This could be in a Tarantino movie.

BD: Yeah, it’s got style.

TM: Kind of sexy, like we finally left New Jersey and are almost to Mexico City. Sounds like something you could listen to smoking a big joint and driving really fast through the desert in a Jeep.

BD: I do still hate his voice. I know I sound like a broken record, but I hate his voice. “They got the keys, they got the boxes.” Who is he talking about? The landlord? Was he evicted?

TM: If so, he sounds pretty happy about it.

BD: It’s funny that he finally sounds happy in the song about them having to pack up their lives and flee.

TM: That’s what he always wanted anyway. He’s happy to be unhappy.

BD: “They are the hunters, we are the foxes.” Fox hunting isn’t a thing in the US. Are they in Britain?

TM: I wonder if they recorded the whole thing in like one day. First take.

BD: I sort of feel like they may have? “We have 65 minutes. That leaves eight minutes for a smoke break and a three for a piss.”

TRACK 13: “CLEAN”

BD: Okay, so I hate this song even when Taylor sings it. This is my least favorite song on Taylor’s album, so I am open to his being better.

TM: I really think he could have done more on all these to push it to weird new places.

BD: Because he hasn’t!

TM: Yeah, not really.

BD: He’s just played it like any Berklee music student could have.

TM: Apple Music calls this album “intimate” and “disarming.”

BD: “Disarming”? Who the hell is searching for “disarming” on iTunes? They should be on an FBI watchlist for sexual predators.

TM: I actually don’t find it intimate at all.

BD: I don’t know what the hell this is a metaphor for. His heart isn’t in it.

TM: Well, that’s it. Seagulls again. Coney Island?

BD: Okay, I hated that. I hate Ryan Adams.

TM: I mean I wouldn’t necessarily turn it off, but I don’t plan to turn it on again, which is like the opposite of Tay.

BD: Like elevator music, you couldn’t. Okay, I have to run to therapy, but I’ll be back in 30 minutes for final thoughts.

TM: Go have a good cry. At least you can say this is good music to prep for therapy. Therapy pregame with Ryan Adams.

43 minutes later

BD: I am back. I had a very nice therapy.

TM: Did Ryan come up? Could you get the songs out of your head?

BD: He came up in spirit, but I described him as “my friend who is going through some things.”

TM: The only one I can remember now is “Wildest Dreams.” That’s the one that stuck with me.

BD: Which is a good segue into…What was this album all about?

TM: Existential angst ironically channeled through happy pop music

BD: Yes.

TM: Desaturated Taylor Swift. Tay in black and white.

BD: How a constitutionally angsty person can deliver their angst through pop music. “Words mean nothing—it’s all in the the way you say them.”

TM: While Tay is driving to the party, Ryan is hanging his 5 mm B&W portrait of her music on the wall at the art show in the lunchroom on Friday night, alone.

BD: Like a dramatic actor doing a Shakespeare comedy, it’s not going to be funny, but maybe there is some honesty there? Like, some sort of unplugged brutalism? It’s a very sad album. I’m worried about Ryan. I mean, I’m not really worried because, look, people die. But if I knew him better I would be worried. *If I cared.*

TM: So I’m probably not going to listen to that album ever again. It had its moments, but now I just want to listen to the Taylor version. And feel okay about my life again.

BD: I also will never listen. REVIEW: DON’T BUY, but it’s okay in elevators.

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We Finally Got Around to Ryan Adams’ "1989." Here Are Our Instant Reactions to Every Track.

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Chipotle Says It Dropped GMOs. Now a Court Will Decide If That’s Bullshit.

by VictoriPhilpott Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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What should have been an easy public-relations win for Chipotle is turning into a major headache—but one that could have interesting repercussions in the public debate about genetically modified organisms.

Back in April, the fast-casual burrito chain announced that it would stop serving food prepared with genetically engineered ingredients. At the time it didn’t seem like a huge change, since only a few ingredients—notably the soybean oil used for frying—contained GMOs. (More than 90 percent of the soy grown in the United States is genetically engineered.) But as critics in the media were quick to point out, there was an obvious hole in Chipotle’s messaging: The pigs, chickens, and cows that produce the restaurant’s meat and dairy offerings are raised on feed made with GMO corn. (In fact, 70-90 percent of all GMO crops are used to feed livestock.) And don’t forget the soda fountain, serving up GMO corn syrup by the cup.

Last week, Chipotle got officially called out, when a California woman filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for allegedly misleading consumers about its much-publicized campaign to cut genetically modified organisms from its menu.

“As Chipotle told consumers it was G-M-Over it, the opposite was true,” the complaint reads. “In fact, Chipotle’s menu has never been at any time free of GMOs.”

Chipotle has never denied that its soda, meat, and dairy contain, or are produced with, GMOs. A spokesman, Chris Arnold, said the suit “has no merit and we plan to contest it.” Still, the case raises an unprecedented set of questions about how food companies market products at a time when fewer than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat (they are) and a majority of them think foods made with GMOs should be labeled.

The California statute applied in the lawsuit deals with false advertising: Allegedly, the “Defendant knowingly misrepresented the character, ingredients, uses, and benefits of the ingredients in its Food Products.” The suit then provides a cornucopia of Chipotle marketing materials, such as the image to the left, which implies that that taco has no GMOs in it—even though, if it contains meat, cheese, or sour cream, then GMOs were almost certainly used at some stage of the process. The suit goes on to detail how Chipotle stands to gain financially from this anti-GMO messaging. The upshot is that, according to the complaint, Chipotle knew its stuff was made from GMOs, lied about it, and duped unsuspecting, GMO-averse customers like Colleen Gallagher (the plaintiff) into eating there. (Gallagher is being represented by Kaplan Fox, a law firm that specializes in consumer protection suits. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

It will be up to the court to decide whether Gallagher’s claims have any merit. But there’s a big stumbling block right at the beginning: There’s no agreed-upon legal standard for what qualifies a food as being “non-GMO,” and thus no obvious legal test for whether Chipotle’s ad campaign is legit. In fact, several food lawyers I spoke to said this is the first suit to legally challenge the veracity of that specific claim, which means it could set a precedent (in California, at least) for how other companies deal with the issue in the future. That sets it apart from deceptive marketing suits related to use of the word “organic,” for example, for which there is a lengthy legal standard enforced by the US Department of Agriculture. (Organic food, by the way, is not allowed to contain GMOs.)

“There are many definitions of what constitutes non-GMO that are marketing-based definitions,” said Greg Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “But nothing like the federal standard for organic labeling exists for GMOs at the moment.”

In the context of this lawsuit, that lack of clarity may work to Chipotle’s advantage, said Laurie Beyranevand, a food and ag law professor at Vermont Law School. Without specific guidelines to adhere to, Chipotle could basically be free to make “non-GMO” mean whatever the company wants it to mean (more on that in a minute). The question before the court is about the gap, such as it exists, between Chipotle’s understanding of that term and its customers’ understanding of it, when it comes to the meat, dairy, and soda at the heart of the suit.

Beyranevand said the soda could be a weak point for Chipotle. Even though the company’s website is clear that its soda is made with GMO corn syrup, customers could still be misled by the advertising into thinking it isn’t.

Meat and dairy are a different story, and there’s a bit of existing law that makes Chipotle’s rhetoric seem more defensible. In Vermont, the only state to have passed mandatory GMO labeling laws, meat and dairy products are exempted. And that makes some sense: Even if a chicken has been stuffed full of genetically modified corn its whole life, it’s no more a GMO than I would be if I ate the same corn.

“Chipotle is just sort of riding on the coattails of that state legislation,” Beyranevand said. In other words, Chipotle could have pretty good grounds to argue that a reasonable person wouldn’t confuse its advertising with the notion that livestock aren’t fed GMOs.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Vermont’s approach. That includes the Non-GMO Project, an independent nonprofit that has endorsed nearly 30,000 food products as being non-GMO over the past five years. The group won’t give its stamp of approval to meat products that have been fed GMOs. According to Arnold, Chipotle “would love to source meat and dairy from animals that are raised without GMO feed, but that simply isn’t possible today.”

a GMO by any other name…
Let’s zoom out to the broader issue: Why isn’t there a standard definition for what makes a food product count as “non-GMO”?

The closest thing is a bit of draft language the Food and Drug Administration published in 2001 that was meant as a nonbinding blueprint for companies that want to voluntarily label their foods as non-GMO. Turns out, that simple-sounding phrase is loaded with pitfalls. As “GMO” has gone from a specialized term used by biochemists to describe seeds, to broadly used slang for the products of commercial agriculture, its meaning has gotten pretty garbled. That makes it hard to come up with a legal definition that is both scientifically accurate and makes sense to consumers, and it leaves companies like Chipotle with considerable linguistic latitude.

First of all, there’s the “O” in GMO. A burrito, no matter what’s in it, isn’t really an “organism,” the FDA points out: “It would likely be misleading to suggest that a food that ordinarily would not contain entire ‘organisms’ is ‘organism-free.'” Then there’s the “GM”: Essentially all food crops are genetically modified from their original version, either through conventional breeding or through biotechnology. Even if most consumers use “GMO” as a synonym for biotech, the FDA says, it may not be truly accurate to call an intensively bred corn variety “not genetically modified.”

Finally, there’s the “non”: It might not actually be possible to say with certainty that a product contains zero traces of genetically engineered ingredients, given the factory conditions under which items such as soy oil are produced. Moreover, chemists have found that vegetables get so mangled when they’re turned into oil that it’s incredibly difficult to extract any recognizable DNA from the end product that could be used to test for genetic modification. So it would be hard, if not impossible, for an agency like the FDA to snag your tacos and deliver a verdict on whether they are really GMO-free.

The point is that Chipotle likely isn’t bound to any particular definition of the non-GMO label, and that we just have to take their word that the ingredients they say are non-GMO are, in fact, non-GMO. Lawmakers are attempting to clear up some of this ambiguity: House Republicans, led by Mike Pompeo (Kan.), succeeded in July in passing a bill that would block states from passing mandatory GMO labeling laws similar to Vermont’s. The bill is now stalled in the Senate, but it contains a provision that would require the USDA to come up with a voluntary certification for companies like Chipotle that want to flaunt their GMO-less-ness.

Until then, another solution would is to seek non-GMO certification from the Non-GMO Project, though the group would likely reject Chipotle’s meat products. In any case, Arnold said, neither Chipotle nor its suppliers are certified through the project, and they don’t intend to pursue that option.

“We are dealing with relatively niche suppliers for many of the ingredients we use,” Arnold said. “By adhering to a single certification standard, we can really cut into available supply of ingredients that are, in some cases, already in short supply.”

With all this in mind, here’s a final caveat: When Chipotle has its day in court, how we actually define what is or isn’t a GMO product might not matter too much, explained Emily Leib, deputy director of Harvard’s Center for Health Law. That’s because the California laws in question here are as much about what customers think a term means, as what it actually does mean.

“The court will ask, ‘Is there a definition of non-GMO or not?” Leib said. “They’ll say, ‘No,’ and then they’ll ask, ‘Is this misleading?’ How does this use compare to what people think it means?”

That’s what makes this case interesting, since the truth is that most of the burrito-eating public knows very little about GMOs. Does that make it illegal for Chipotle to leverage peoples’ ambiguous (and mostly unfounded) fears to sell more barbacoa? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, probably don’t eat too much Chipotle, anyway.

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Chipotle Says It Dropped GMOs. Now a Court Will Decide If That’s Bullshit.

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One Important Suicide Fact That Nobody Is Talking About

by FaithZoxbuqajj Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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We hear about gun violence in blips: The latest mass shooting or grizzly homicide brings national attention and calls to action, and then the issue falls under the radar. It’s easy to forget that two-thirds of gun deaths aren’t high-profile homicides, but suicides—happening quietly, at a rate of one every 25 minutes.

Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

A new report by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun safety advocacy group, delivers sobering stats based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and academic journal articles—perhaps the most eye-opening being that keeping a firearm at home increases the risk of suicide by three times. A whopping 82 percent of teens who commit suicide with a gun are using a family member’s firearm.

Guns are a particularly effective means of suicide precisely because they are so lethal: Of those who attempt suicide by firearm, nine in 10 succeed. By contrast, only one in 50 overdose attempts result in death. The lethality is compounded by impulsivity: The majority of suicide attempts occur less than an hour after the decision is made to commit suicide.

One common argument of the gun lobby is that suicidal individuals will find a way to take their lives—if they don’t die by gun, they’ll do it by some other means. But the reality is that 90 percent of those who fail in a suicide attempt do not end up dying by suicide. With guns, though, not many get a second chance.

Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

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One Important Suicide Fact That Nobody Is Talking About

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Federal Court to EPA: No, You Can’t Approve This Pesticide That Kills Bees

by DavidPigdon Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a federal appeals court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of a pesticide called sulfoxaflor. Marketed by agrichemical giant Dow AgroSciences, sulfoxaflor belongs to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which have been implicated by a growing weight of evidence in the global crisis in bee health. In a blunt opinion, the court cited the “precariousness of bee populations” and “flawed and limited data” submitted by Dow on the pesticide’s effects on beleaguered pollinating insects.

Before winning approval for sulfoxaflor back in 2013, the company hyped the product to investors, declaring that it “addresses a $2 billion market need currently unmet by biotech solutions,” particularly for cotton and rice.

US beekeepers were less enthusiastic—a group of national beekeeping organizations, along with the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, quickly sued the EPA to withdraw its registration of sulfoxaflor, claiming that the EPA itself had found sulfoxaflor to be “highly toxic to honey bees, and other insect pollinators.”

Thursday’s ruling, a response to that suit, took their side. It applies only to sulfoxaflor, which Dow markets as a foliar spray on a variety of crops, including cotton, soybean, citrus, stone fruit, nuts, grapes, potatoes, vegetables, and strawberries. It has no bearing on the EPA’s equally controversial approval of other neonics like clothianidin and imidacloprid, which are widely used as seed treatments on the two most prominent US crops: corn and soybeans.

But Greg Loarie, an attorney for EarthJustice who argued the case for the beekeeper’s coalition, told me that the decision has broad significance because the ruling “makes clear” that when the EPA is assessing new pesticides, it must assess robust data on the health impacts on the entire hive, not just on individual adult bees.

In its opinion, the court rebuked the EPA for approving sulfoxaflor despite “inconclusive or insufficient data on the effects…on brood development and long-term colony health.” That’s a problem, the court added, because pesticides can cause subtle harm to bees that don’t kill them but that “ripple through the hive,” which is an “interdependent ‘superorganism.'” Indeed, many independent studies have demonstrated just such effects—that low-level exposure to neonics is “sub-lethal” to individual bees but compromises long-term hive health.

“The EPA doesn’t have that hive-level information on very many insecticides, if any,” Loarie said.

And in the case of sulfoxaflor, the agency didn’t try very hard to get that information. In January 2013, because of major gaps in research on the new chemical’s effect on bees, the EPA decided to grant sulfoxaflor “conditional registration” and ordered Dow to provide more research. And then a few months later, the agency granted sulfoxaflor unconditional registration—even though “the record reveals that Dow never completed the requested additional studies,” the court opinion states.

In an even more scathing addendum to the court’s main opinion, Circuit Judge N.R. Smith added, “I am inclined to believe the EPA…decided to register sulfoxaflor unconditionally in response to public pressure for the product and attempted to support its decision retroactively with studies it had previously found inadequate.” The judge added, “Such action seems capricious.”

Sulfoxaflor’s twisted path through the EPA’s approval process isn’t the first time the agency has green-lighted a neonicotinoid pesticide under dodgy circumstances, as I showed in this 2010 piece on clothianidin, a widely marketed pesticide marketed by Dow’s European rival, Bayer.

In 2013—the same year the EPA approved sulfoxaflor—the European Union placed a two-year moratorium on clothianidin and two other major neonics, citing pollinator health concerns. For a study released last year, the US Geological Survey found neonic traces in all the Midwestern rivers and streams it tested, declaring them to be “both mobile and persistent in the environment.” In addition to harming bees, neonics may also harm birds and fish, Canadian researchers have found.

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Federal Court to EPA: No, You Can’t Approve This Pesticide That Kills Bees

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John Kasich Was Against Poor People Before He Was for Them

by JFABethczpcpbq Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the crowded field of GOP presidential hopefuls, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has earned a reputation as a moderate conservative on fiscal issues. He often brings up his empathy for the economic problems facing regular Americans, from burdensome health care costs to ballooning student debt and unemployment. Last year, at a biannual retreat for donors organized by conservative megadonors the Koch brothers, an attendee confronted Kasich about his decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio. “When I get to the pearly gates,” Kasich fired back, “I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”

When he arrives at those pearly gates, he may have some explaining to do. The tax policies Kasich has championed and implemented since he was elected governor in 2010 left Ohio’s low-income folks worse off than they were decades ago. His economic policies have led to growing inequality in a state that should be in recovery. Median household incomes began falling in 2007 and continued to drop during Kasich’s governorship. They are currently lower than they were in 1984, even though the overall state economy has actually grown healthier.

“The real reason this growth has not translated into gains for the middle and working class is that an increasingly large share of the state’s economic gains has been directed to those at the top,” wrote researchers David Madland and Danielle Corley in a Center for American Progress report published last month.

When Kasich launched his bid for governor in 2009, the state was reeling from the recession, when Ohio lost almost 400,000 jobs. Kasich’s campaign promised to “right the ship,” using leaner budgets to boost employment and helps recovery. His big strategy: phasing out the personal income tax in Ohio, a goal that Kasich highlighted in nearly all of his campaign speeches. He argued that the tax hurt Ohio’s ability to attract businesses and new residents.

“We’ll march over time to destroy that income tax that has sucked the vitality out of this state,” Kasich said when he kicked off his bid for governor. He called getting rid of the income tax “absolutely essential” for the state, “so that we no longer are an obstacle for people to locate here and that we can create a reason for people to stay here.” He did acknowledge, however, that the state’s dire budget situation would make this difficult to do in his first term.

Nonetheless, when Kasich began his first term as governor, he sought to slash a different tax by proposing to eliminate Ohio’s income tax on capital gains, the profits that come from selling off assets like stocks or bonds. Kasich is intimately familiar with the hefty benefits the wealthy glean from this sort of tax, having worked for nearly eight years as an investment banker at Lehmann Brothers. Had he been successful, roughly three-fourths of the cut’s financial gain would have gone to the top 1 percent of Ohio’s earners, while middle-class taxpayers would have gotten an average tax cut of just $2. Kasich abandoned the extreme proposal after learning that the measure might be unconstitutional.

Still, the two-year budget that Kasich ultimately enacted was filled with tax breaks for the rich that would simultaneously hurt middle-class families. The budget either created or tweaked more than a dozen tax breaks for various industries, including energy and agriculture. Policy Matters Ohio, an economic policy research nonprofit, pointed out at the time that the lost government revenue from the budget’s tax cuts, new and old, would amount to about $7 billion a year—a big chunk came from money saved by industry and the wealthy as opposed to low- and middle-income families.

Perhaps the most debilitating cut Kasich introduced in the 2011 budget was the successful repeal of Ohio’s estate tax. This was another tax he vowed to eliminate during his bid for governor, telling audiences repeatedly that the tax was driving out successful Ohioans. He’s often joked that entrepreneurs were “moving to Florida,” which doesn’t have an estate tax.

In fact, when it still existed, the tax took just 6 or 7 percent of estates valued over $338,333—the lowest estate tax rate of any state—and affected only the wealthiest 8 percent of the state’s residents. Nearly all estate tax revenue (80 percent) went to fund local governments. The tax’s repeal meant that local governments statewide lost more than $200 million, leading to cuts in critical services, including public safety workers like police officers and firefighters, city planning, recreation, and emergency response. Cuts like this, says Wendy Patton, a senior project director at Policy Matters Ohio, tend to hit low-income communities harder.

“For example, the city of Toledo closed some pools. What is the impact on the family when the children don’t have a safe place to play for their summer recreation?” Patton says. “This is more important to a family that can’t purchase a pass to a private pool, and depends on public recreation centers. It’s an issue of greater importance when you go down the income scale.”

In the 2013 budget process, Kasich introduced still more tax cuts. His final budget package cut income tax rates by 10 percent and increased the state’s sales tax, moves that tilted the tax system to benefit wealthier families. This is because while income taxes are progressive, meaning different income brackets pay a proportional share, sales taxes are regressive: When the same percentage applies to everyone, it cuts deeper into the overall income of lower earners.

“The move to a higher sales tax and a lower income tax exacerbates inequality,” Patton says. “As the tax structure in Ohio becomes even more regressive, poor people pay a larger share of their income than wealthy people do.”

Kasich often points to his introduction of the 5 percent Earned Income Tax Credit in the state as another example of his compassionate conservatism. A version of this credit—a federal tax break for low-income working families adjusted based on income, marital status, and number of kids—is also implemented at the state level in 26 other states. Kasich has touted Ohio’s EITC, which he introduced in the 2013 budget, as an example of his commitment to helping the working poor.

In fact, the credit did little to help Ohio’s poorest families for two reasons: first, because it is nonrefundable, and then because it was introduced in the context of other tax changes that disproportionately burdened the poor. Both the federal credit and most states’ credits are refundable, which means that those who receive them often receive a greater refund at the end of the year. Not so in Ohio. Kasich’s nonrefundable credit doesn’t increase a family’s tax refund—it can only reduce the taxes already owed. This primarily hurts those who need the credit most: low-earning households that owe little to no taxes. Ohio is also the only state that caps its EITC.

Kasich’s credit was part of a budget that resulted in an overall tax increase for the bottom 40 percent of taxpayers, due to the rise in the sales tax and other tweaks. In 2015, for the third time in his tenure as governor and at the beginning of his second term, he proposed more cuts to income taxes and yet another jump in the sales tax from 5.75 percent to 6.25 percent. Ultimately, the budget compromise implemented an income tax cut (though a smaller one than Kasich had suggested), an additional sales tax for cigarettes, and an increased tax cut for businesses, among other measures.

Once again, the budget brought tax savings for the wealthy, and higher taxes for those who can least afford them. An analysis of the 2015 budget by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy found that about half the benefit of the tax cuts, totaling about $1 billion, would go into the pockets of the top 1 percent of Ohioans, while the only group that would see a tax increase was the bottom 20 percent of earners.

In spite of this layering of tax cuts, Kasich the presidential candidate has repeatedly trumpeted his commitment to helping the poor. “If you pick up Psalm 41, you know what the first couple of lines are? You’ll be remembered for what you do for the poor,” Kasich said in a Fox News interview in July. “You can’t allow people to be stuck in the ditch. You’ve got to help them to get out…And that’s what we’re doing in this state.”

But the reality in Ohio isn’t so optimistic. “The tax cuts are shifting the tax system so it is more dependent on lower- and middle-income taxpayers and less dependent on those who are most able to pay,” says Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters Ohio. “Wages have not gone up in a meaningful way for the bulk of Ohioans, and we are taking funds needed for municipalities and giving them to people who don’t need it. It’s a shocking set of priorities.”

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John Kasich Was Against Poor People Before He Was for Them

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