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White Ballot Access, Black Ballot Access

by CarolynMazure Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent draws our attention today to a new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress on, among other things, ballot access in all 50 states plus DC. They grade each state based on things like availability of preregistration, availability of in-person early voting, voter ID laws, voting wait times, and so forth.

You will be unsurprised by the results. The top map shows ballot access, with the darker colors indicating poor access. The bottom map shows the percentage of the African-American population in each state. Dark colors indicate a higher black population. Kinda funny how similar they look, isn’t it?

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White Ballot Access, Black Ballot Access

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How Jazzman Robert Glasper Won Over the Hip-Hop Heads

by RachellPollak Posted on June 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Robert Glasper Jacob Blickenstaff

Pianist Robert Glasper is a leading figure in the contemporary jazz scene, but he has never been far from his diverse influences. And while he possesses a deep gift for invention and improvisation, his music often incorporates the chords and sequences fundamental to hip-hop, R&B, and modern gospel.

With his fourth album, Double Booked, Glasper introduced a new band, the Robert Glasper Experiment, that pivoted further from traditional jazz to explore elements of the latter genres. Two albums with the Experiment followed, Black Radio and Black Radio 2, featuring an impressive roster of guest vocalists—among others, Erykah Badu, Musiq Soulchild, Lalah Hathaway, and Yasin Bey. The albums netted Glasper two Grammys—one in 2013 for Best R&B album, the second this year for Best traditional R&B performance.

On his latest album, Covered, out earlier this month, Glasper features his original trio with bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid. Recorded in front of a small audience at Capitol Studios, it reinterprets a wide variety of songs, including cuts from the Black Radio albums and alumni, as well as Joni Mitchell, John Legend, Jhené Aiko, Radiohead, and Kendrick Lamar—with the Victor Young standard “Stella By Starlight” for good measure. I caught up with Glasper as his trio kicked off a week-long run at the Village Vanguard, the famed New York City jazz venue. He is currently on tour.

Mother Jones: After two well-received Black Radio albums, you’re going back to piano trio format. What’s new this time around?

Robert Glasper: I’ve acquired a new audience. Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream; younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans, mixed in with the jazz audience. Since those two albums, my audience has grown a lot bigger. I didn’t want to just go back to doing straight-up jazz standards or trio songs. We purposely did cover songs to make everyone happy. And it makes me happy too. The kind of “jazz way” is just doing another album the same way with different songs. But I like to wait until I have a nice concept. Now I have another avenue that I can go down, that I have to go down, because of the audience I’ve acquired.

MJ: Is there any common element to the songs on Covered?

RG: Nope.

MJ: Where do they come from then?

RG: I wanted to do a mix of old songs that I love and some new songs that I love to keep it modern. I’m pretty eclectic, so that’s why I was like, Joni Mitchell, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Musiq Soulchild, Jhené Aiko—I love that! That’s literally what my iPod looks like.

MJ: In past interviews, you’ve talked about using personal honesty—about the music you like and who you are—to navigate between genres and move your career forward. Where does that come from?

RG: It came from my mother. She passed away in 2004. She was a singer, and literally, every day of the week she sang at a different club in a different genre of music: country, R&B clubs, jazz clubs, church on Sunday morning where she was the music director, pop hits, soft rock, she loved Broadway, Liza Minelli. I grew up listening to all this music, so it was never one thing for me. When my friends were listening to hip-hop or R&B, I was in the crib listening to Billy Joel and Michael Bolton, Luther Vandross, and Oscar Peterson. And she was always, “Yes, that’s who you are. It’s everything.” So I got that confidence to stick with that and not be ashamed of it from super early.

MJ: When you play a place like the Village Vanguard, which is a shrine to jazz, especially to jazz trios, do you find there’s still new territory to explore?

RG: What I’m doing now is kind of open territory. I don’t feel like it’s really been done the way that I’m doing it without it being smooth jazz. I think I’m walking a pretty fine line. There are a few specific things that I pay attention to that if you don’t, you’re gonna be in the smooth jazz lane.

MJ: Like what?

RG: When it came to the Experiment band, it was the amount of solos you take. Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones. So we narrowed it down. Over the course of the whole night Casey Benjamin and I might only take one, maybe another in the encore. But we’re improvising at the same time, we’re grooving, and peoples’ heads are nodding, so you leave full. It’s just enough soloing for the mainstream person to be enlightened by that, but it’s not beating them over the head.

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that? When Cannonball Adderley did shows, he said, “First 20 minutes we’ll jazz out, then the last hour it’s gonna be songs that people paid to see.” Which is why he was driving a Rolls-Royce and everybody else was driving whatever. Miles Davis, too. I asked Herbie Hancock a few days ago, “When I hear bootlegs of Miles Davis with the ’60s Quintet, I never hear like, “Pinocchio,” or “Fall,” or “Nefertiti,” or any of those dope songs that y’all recorded. Why not?” Herbie said, “Miles wanted to play songs that people knew.” Jazz was struggling back then, too. But people knew standards. So that’s why they were going to play “Autumn Leaves.”

MJ: Besides the trio and the Experiment, is there a third approach you have been considering?

RG: I’m gonna do a gospel record, Black Radio-style, kind of. I grew up in church. That’s how most young African-American musicians learn how to perform. You could be six years old and playing organ or drums in front of thousands or hundreds of people. You’re performing every week. People don’t think about it like that, but that’s what it is. You’re in charge of emotion, and bringing certain things to fruition, and bringing all the spirit in. And it’s a real thing. I was playing drums in church when I was six. Then I picked up the piano when I was 11 or 12. A lot of the mainstream R&B people or hip-hop or whatever, the whole urban world, are from the church. So this would be an album that everyone would love.

Robert Glasper back stage at the Village Vanguard Jacob Blickenstaff

MJ: Both in your trio and the Experiment, I hear a central element of repetition, similar to a sample or loop. Is there a feeling you get from that; is it something hypnotic?

RG: That’s exactly what it is. I think there’s beauty in repetition. And that’s part of my culture and African culture as well: repeated things, mantra. It’s spiritual, it’s meditation, it’s Buddhism, it’s praying, it’s all these things. It’s the repetitive thing that brings space. That’s one of the things I love secretly about hip-hop. Jazz doesn’t have that element. It changes every bar, nothing is ever the same. Most jazz musicians get off on making it different every time. But that approach is not as spiritual. Coltrane would stay on one chord, and you’d keep hearing that one sound, over and over. He would play all kinds of stuff over it, but you just hear this one chord.

MJ: As Coltrane got more advanced, his music became simpler.

RG: Exactly. It became more about spirituality versus how many chord changes you can play over. That’s one of the things that I think a lot of people like about hip-hop, but they don’t even realize. Normally hip-hop repeats every four bars—it’s a very small chunk. And it’s about the head nod. I almost feel like it’s like full circle when I play with my trio. A lot of the origins of hip-hop are the sampling of jazz records, especially jazz trios. So I think, “Let’s mimic the producer who is sampling the jazz trio.” You see people close their eyes, and it takes them to another place. I almost think of it like we’re supplying the house, and the listener can move their own furniture in. Whatever you’re going through, we’re the soundtrack to your thoughts, and we’ll just leave space for you to move your shit in. I think people leave my shows feeling good. Instead of hearing, “Oh, he’s good,” I’d rather hear, “Wow, you changed my feelings today, you made me feel different.”

MJ: What’s hard for you?

RG: The hard part is balancing. I have a family, a five-year-old son—you know, life. That is probably the hardest part. The music is not hard to me. What is hard also is getting the respect of the mainstream. I won two R&B Grammys. If I was a singer who won those Grammys, I’d be gracing all the magazine covers—all the urban magazine covers—something. I barely got asked to do an interview. When we won the first Grammy, and we went backstage to do all the interviews after you win, holding the award and talking, people were like looking at their sheets going, “So, do you guys…sing?” “No, we’re an instrumental band.” “Oh, umm…” You know, it’s confusing! But if you ask people they say, “Oh! I love the music, Oh! I love that album.” Okay, well, give me those same opportunities. I’m trying to break down that barrier. I want to get that kind of love.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.

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How Jazzman Robert Glasper Won Over the Hip-Hop Heads

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Mississippi’s Republican Senators Say the State’s Confederate Symbol Has Got to Go

by CristinTang Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update: Sen. Thad Cochran, the state’s senior senator, has joined his colleague in appealing to the state legislature to change the Mississippi flag. “it is my personal hope that the state government will consider changing its flag,” he said in a statement. The original story is below:

When Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) was asked on Sunday about removing the Confederate cross from his state’s flag, he demurred. That decision “should be up to the Mississippi legislature and the people of the state,” he argued. But 48 hours later, he has changed his mind. On Wednesday, he released a statement calling for the current incarnation of the flag to be “put in the museum” and replaced with something else:

After reflection and prayer, I now believe our state flag should be put in a museum and replaced by one that is more unifying to all Mississippians. As the descendant of several brave Americans who fought for the Confederacy, I have not viewed Mississippi’s current state flag as offensive. However, it is clearer and clearer to me that many of my fellow citizens feel differently and that our state flag increasingly portrays a false impression of our state to others.

In I Corinthians 8, the Apostle Paul said he had no personal objection to eating meat sacrificed to idols. But he went on to say that “if food is a cause of trouble to my brother, or makes my brother offend, I will give up eating meat.” The lesson from this passage leads me to conclude that the flag should be removed since it causes offense to so many of my brothers and sisters, creating dissention rather than unity.

This is an issue to be decided by the legislature and other state government officials and not dictated by Washington. If I can be part of a process to achieve consensus within our state, I would welcome the opportunity to participate.

Wicker joins the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, the nephew of former Gov. Haley Barbour, and the state’s Republican speaker of the House among other prominent Mississippians who have called for the Confederate symbol to go after the murder of nine African American parishioners at a church last week in Charleston, South Carolina.

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Mississippi’s Republican Senators Say the State’s Confederate Symbol Has Got to Go

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Judge in Dylann Roof Case Has a History of Racist Comments

by FloraWessel254 Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The judge who held the bond hearing for Dylann Roof, the suspect in the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, has a history of making racist comments, according to court documents. The Daily Beast reports that in 2003, Magistrate James B.Gosnell told a black defendant, “There are four kinds of people in this world—black people, white people, red necks, and n—rs.” The comment led to a disciplinary proceeding that was eventually heard by the state Supreme Court in 2005.

During the investigation, according to records from the proceeding, Gosnell argued that his statement was excusable because “he knew the defendant, the defendant’s father, and the defendant’s grandfather,” and that he was merely repeating something he remembered hearing from “a veteran African American sheriff’s deputy.” The document goes on to say:

“Respondent Gosnell alleges he repeated this statement to the defendant in an ill-considered effort to encourage him to recognize and change the path he had chosen in life.”

The same proceeding details another ethical pickle that Gosnell found himself in two days after the racist comment, when he allegedly helped get another judge out of jail in a DUI case.

“Respondent Gosnell met the arresting officer and Judge Mendelsohn at the detention center. At some point, respondent took possession of the ticket, placed a ‘bond hearing’ stamp on the back, and entered the amount of $1,002.00. When detention center officials expressed concerns over Judge Mendelsohn’s release, respondent remarked ‘this didn’t happen until 8:00 a.m.,’ or words of similar import and effect. Respondent acknowledges it was his intention to facilitate Judge Mendelsohn’s release without waiting for the morning bond hearing and to make it appear that Judge Mendelsohn’s bond was set at 8:00 a.m. in accordance with Mount Pleasant’s bond procedure.”

Gosnell ultimately kept his job when the court concluded that an official reprimand would suffice.

At Friday’s bond hearing, Gosnell won praise for letting members of the victims’ families confront Roof directly. But some were surprised when he made comments about Roof’s family members being victims of the tragedy as well.

Charged with nine counts of murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, Roof is due back in court on October 23. His bail for the weapon charges was set by Gosnell at $1 million, but the judge said he did not have the authority to set bail for murder charges.

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Judge in Dylann Roof Case Has a History of Racist Comments

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Justice Clarence Thomas Cites NFL Player’s Memoir to Support Executing Mentally Disabled Man

by KatheriIVGI Posted on June 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Supreme Court justices generally support their opinions with references to other cases and perhaps the occasional scientific study. But on Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas cited an unusual source in his dissent in a death penalty case: the memoir of a professional football player. The player is also the son of the victim in the case. Thomas’ unorthodox move prompted two of his fellow conservatives to distance themselves from this section of his dissent, which they otherwise supported.

The case in question is Brumfield v. Cain, in which death row inmate Kevan Brumfield argued that the state of Louisiana denied him the opportunity to prove in court that he is intellectually disabled and, consequently, exempt from execution. Brumfield’s attorney had presented evidence that Brumfield was born prematurely, had been in special ed in elementary school, had a low IQ of 75, had been abused by his stepfather, and had spent time in a mental hospital and group homes due to his disability. But he was sentenced to death before a 2002 Supreme Court decision that the Eighth Amendment barred the execution of the intellectually disabled. After that decision, Brumfield petitioned the Louisiana courts to allow him a hearing to show that his disability should exempt him from execution. The Louisiana courts denied his requests, and the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. On Thursday, the Supreme Court majority reversed the lower court and ruled in Brumfield’s favor, sending his case back to Louisiana for further hearings on his mental capacity.

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Justice Clarence Thomas Cites NFL Player’s Memoir to Support Executing Mentally Disabled Man

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Rachel Dolezal Sued Howard University for Racial Discrimination

by JacklynHume Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new report from the Smoking Gun claims Rachel Dolezal—the Spokane woman who has lied for years about being African American— sued Howard University in 2002. According to court documents obtained by the site, Dolezal, who went by Rachel Moore at the time, sued the historically black college by alleging discrimination “based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.” From the report:

She alleged that Smith and other school officials improperly blocked her appointment to a teaching assistant post, rejected her application for a post-graduate instructorship, and denied her scholarship aid while she was a student.

The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.

Two years later, a judge dismissed the lawsuit.

Earlier on Monday, Dolezal posted a letter on Facebook announcing her resignation as president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP after the news broke that she had been pretending to be black for many years. The allegations, accompanied by her birth certificate, were made by her biological parents, both of whom are white.

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Rachel Dolezal Sued Howard University for Racial Discrimination

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Police Kill Black Women Too—and We Don’t Talk About It Enough

by ArnoldoRobillar Posted on June 11, 2015

Mother Jones

During protests that shook Baltimore in April, Freddie Gray’s name became a rallying cry in calls for criminal justice reform nationwide. But how many of us have heard of Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed black woman who was fatally shot by a police detective in Chicago back in 2012? Just five days before demonstrations erupted for Gray in Maryland and then across the country, a judge acquitted the Chicago detective who killed Boyd, despite finding that he had acted in a manner that was “beyond reckless”.

Read “What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?“—Charlie LeDuff’s examination of what one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

Last month, activists in about 17 cities rallied to highlight Boyd’s name—and the names of other black women who have lost their lives to police violence, such as Yvette Smith, Shereese Francis, and Tanisha Anderson. In New York, activists carried a coffin through the streets; in San Francisco, some protesters bared their breasts, borrowing from traditions of resistance in Liberia and other African nations. Others took to Twitter with the hashtag #SayHerName, in conjunction with the African American Policy Forum’s launch of a report by the same title, which called on policymakers and the media to include women’s experiences in conversations about police brutality.

“Black women and women of color can no longer be expected to lead movements challenging police brutality but be silent about our own experiences,” wrote co-author Andrea Ritchie in an introduction to the report. Ritchie, a police misconduct attorney in New York, has fought against inappropriate policing of black women and LGBT citizens for two decades. She co-wrote a book on the subject, Queer (In)Justice, and has testified before the UN Committee Against Torture and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Two weeks after the report dropped, I caught up with Ritchie, who’s now a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, to talk about why some disturbing videos of excessive force never went mainstream and how her years of activism are paying off.

Andrea Ritchie

Mother Jones: We’ve been hearing much more lately about police violence against black men. To what extent is the media to blame for framing the issue in a narrow way?

Andrea Ritchie: I’ve been doing a workshop for maybe 10 years now where I start with a pop quiz, asking, ‘What’s the first image that comes to mind when I say police brutality?’ and ‘What’s the first image that comes to mind when I say violence against women?’. No matter who I’m talking to, the first name that comes to mind is always that of a man—either Rodney King, Oscar Grant, or Eric Garner or Michael Brown. It’s generational. And the image is always of a shooting or a beating. For violence against women, the image is very much one of private violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault, but not physical violence by police officers or sexual violence by police officers.

When I ask folks why they think that is, the media is the number one answer—they say, ‘That’s what we hear about, that’s the story we’re told.’ Even when a case comes up involving a black woman, it’s framed as an anomaly, or shoved into a narrative that makes black men the primary target. In Rekia Boyd’s case, for instance, they said she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, next to a bunch of black men the police were targeting. There’s a story that state violence affects men and that interpersonal violence affects women, but what this ends up doing is erasing men who experience interpersonal violence and women who experience state violence. We need to pick apart that narrative.

MJ: Is part of the problem that violence against women hasn’t been caught on camera, like the killing of Eric Garner in New York was, for example?

AR: I don’t think that’s the case. An example is Duanna Johnson, a black trans woman who they arrested for loitering for the purposes of prostitution. She was in the precinct being processed, and the police officer called her over to be fingerprinted using slurs—she didn’t answer to the slurs. He walked over, grabbed metal handcuffs around his knuckles, and proceeded to start pounding her in the face while another officer held her down, and the security camera from the police facility recorded the whole thing. She was on the floor, they pepper sprayed her face. Again, it got some coverage locally, but that didn’t become the video that sparked uprisings around the nation. And it did not become the image that comes to mind when we think about police beatings.

Several weeks after Eric Garner was killed, a pregnant black women was placed in a chokehold by police officers. Now, thankfully she did not die—she and her baby were fine—but the video was there, and again, that wasn’t the thing that sparked outrage.

MJ: There seems to be a common belief in the US that black men fare worse than any other group, particularly in the criminal justice system. They are known for being locked up at higher rates and fatally shot by police officers. Do you think this notion of “black male exceptionalism” contributes to the exclusion of women’s experiences from conversations about criminal justice?

AR: I hate thinking about who is experiencing oppression the most because in black communities we’re all experiencing racial oppression and anti-black racism in different ways. But this notion that black women aren’t experiencing the same kinds of racial disparities is not borne out by the numbers available. In 2013, black women were stopped by police cars more than black men, white women, and white men in Ferguson, Missouri. Black girls have a higher rate of school suspensions relative to white girls than black boys do relative to white boys, and that’s much worse if they’re gender nonconforming, if they’re trans, or if they are queer, but that’s not part of the conversation about the state of black youth in the United States. For almost three decades, black and brown women were the fastest growing prison population, but somehow that didn’t feature in the conversation around the ‘new Jim Crow’ or mass incarceration. The rate of poverty for black women is growing and it is high, the rate of homelessness for black women is high, and black women are marginalized economically on many fronts.

MJ: It’s tough to get data on police violence broken down by both gender and race. A recent Guardian investigation found that 5 percent of people killed by cops so far this year have been women, including seven black women. But as your report makes clear, black women also experience many other forms of state violence that often aren’t included in the narrative of police brutality.

AR: You need to look beyond beatings and shootings to sexual violence, to police responses to domestic violence, their treatment of pregnant and mothering women, and their treatment of LGBT folks. If a police officer responds differently to a black woman survivor of domestic violence, by shooting or beating her, for instance, than they do to a white woman under identical circumstances, I don’t understand how that’s not considered racial profiling—making a decision about whether someone is a victim or threat based on race.

MJ: Can you talk more about the problem of sexual harassment by police officers?

AR: Sexual assault and harassment is the most frequently reported form of police misconduct after the use of force. And despite a 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police that identified the problem and called out departments across the country to enact policies to prevent and address it, very few departments actually have policies to prevent, detect, and hold officers accountable for sexual harassment and assault of members of the public. They have that for officers interacting with each other, because that’s part of federal law, but they don’t have anything specifically targeting sexual harassment and assault of members of the public by police.

MJ: It seems there’s more momentum now behind the #SayHerName movement, with the launch of your report and the demonstrations last month. What comes next?

AR: It feels like we’ve turned a corner. Now the challenge is to get the president to start talking about this issue. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing just made a bunch of recommendations that are very specific to women and LGBT folks’ experiences, including that departments should adopt comprehensive profiling bans that prohibit profiling based on gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation alongside race, religion, and ethnicity. Those things are happening now, but nobody is talking about them. So on the one hand, the floodgates are open; on the other, there are a few more that need to be opened before we can really start having the kind of conversations we need to be having to keep all of our communities safe.

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Police Kill Black Women Too—and We Don’t Talk About It Enough

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Inside the Unlikely Coalition That Just Got the Death Penalty Banned in Nebraska

by RexRubensohn Posted on May 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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When the final aye of the roll call vote was recorded on the electronic panel above the West Chamber of the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln yesterday, the crowd in the galleries overlooking the floor couldn’t contain their shouts of relief. Or maybe it was disbelief. The wooden benches were filled with death penalty opponents who had come hoping to see the senators of the unicameral Legislature override Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto of a bill repealing the state’s death penalty law—but they had good reason to worry they no longer had the necessary votes. After enduring more than two hours of heated debate (ranging from tearful stories of personal evolution to bellowed passages from the Bible), the override received exactly the 30 votes required. The death penalty was officially abolished in Nebraska, and activists whooped and clapped, prompting gavel-pounding and calls for order.

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Inside the Unlikely Coalition That Just Got the Death Penalty Banned in Nebraska

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Here’s One Way the Developing World Totally Has America Beat

by BryantTroy Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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China is by far the world’s biggest investor in clean energy technologies like solar and wind. Last year, its clean energy spending hit a record $83 billion, a 39 percent jump from the year before, and more than twice what is spent in the United States.

Although America and most other G20 nations are moving toward a clean energy overhaul, its the developing world where you’ll find the most explosive growth: When you add in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and South Africa, clean energy investment in developing countries totaled $131 billion in 2014, only six percent less than the combined total for developed countries. It’s the closest that gap has ever been, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF):

BNEF

That gap will soon close, and then start growing in the other direction, according to a new report from the Pew Trust. Based on financial data from BNEF, the report’s authors project that more than $7 trillion will be invested in new energy systems by 2030, two-thirds of it in developing countries. (Pew’s analysis doesn’t put China in that category.) Roughly $5 trillion of it will be clean energy investment.

It’s no mystery why developing countries are positioning themselves to win this race. For one, they need the electricity. As it stands, more than 1.3 billion people, mostly in Asia, India, and sub-Saharan Africa, live without access to reliable modern service:

Pew

If you want to bring electricity to places without a power grid, renewables have lots of advantages. For one, it’s far cheaper and faster to build a solar or wind farm than a coal or gas-fired generation plant. And renewables can be built locally, on a small scale, eliminating the need for long-distance transmission lines. Consider what happened with cellphones: Mobile technology became cheap and ubiquitous before many African nations had landline networks, so people just “leapfrogged” straight to wireless.

The same phenomenon is afoot in the energy market, says Todd Moss, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, who was not involved with the Pew report. “I don’t have any doubt that over the next two generations we’ll see colossal investments in the energy sector in many African countries” and in India.

Compare the maps above and below. You’ll note a strong connection between so-called energy poverty (above) and future power demand (below), in Africa especially. This is hardly surprising, but only in the past few years has renewable energy has become affordable and accessible enough to get the transformation rolling.

Pew

Energy poverty isn’t the only factor driving clean energy’s growth. In Bulgaria or Ukraine, both of which Pew identified as key places for energy investment in the developing world, the growth is driven by a desire to wrest control from foreign fossil fuel suppliers, i.e. Russia’s Gazprom. That’s according to Phyllis Cuttino, a clean energy analyst who authored the Pew report. “These countries want to have sources they don’t have to import, and they want to stimulate economic growth,” she said.

The report also identified Kenya, Peru, Taiwan, Morocco, Vietnam, Pakistan, and the Philippines as top attractors of clean energy investment. For now, anyway: The lineup may change from year to year in response to domestic policies (mandates, subsidies, etc.). And Moss said that the report underestimates the role African countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia will play. Still, many developing countries are in for internal political battles over clean energy, of the sort that we’ve seen, and are still fighting, in the United States.

African utility companies also often struggle with bad credit histories, Moss said, which can make it difficult to secure loans from the World Bank or other international institutions. “The key to unlocking investment in the power sector is getting a long-term, credit-worthy deal,” he said.

Regardless of which countries come out ahead, we’re almost certain to see far more money invested in clean energy than in fossil fuels over the next few decades. In the charts below, solar in particular is projected to grow massively by 2030, while new fossil fuel installations will shrink to less than half of the total.

Pew

So where does this leave United States? There’s a huge opportunity for clean energy entrepreneurs to expand into developing countries, Cuttino said. Indeed, according to Commerce Department stats, six of our top 10 destinations for clean energy exports are developing countries. President Barack Obama has made electrification in Africa a signature foreign policy initiative of his second term. That move in itself sends an important signal about the difference between clean energy here and in the developing world. Here the benefits are primarily environmental. There, clean energy is seen as a key step to alleviating poverty.

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Here’s One Way the Developing World Totally Has America Beat

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People of color suffer through extra long commutes

by PorfiriHaddon Posted on May 18, 2015

People of color suffer through extra long commutes

By on 18 May 2015commentsShare

Now for the next injustice: If you live in Minneapolis or St. Paul and you’re not white, it takes longer for you to get to work. A new study put together by four Minnesota nonprofits found a pretty astonishing “transit time penalty”: Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos living in the Twin Cities spend anywhere from 11 to 46 more hours a year commuting on public transit than whites do.

And if you compare those numbers to white drivers, nonwhite transit riders are spending way more time commuting. Here’s the breakdown, from the study:

Translation: Black and Asian transit users lose the equivalent of 3.5 weeks of work each year because of their long commute-times alone. For Latino transit users, it is nearly 4.5 weeks.

Combine that with the fact that significantly more nonwhites are commuting via public transit – in Minnesota and across the country — and you’ll see that this is just stitched through with all kinds of messed up urban policies and socioeconomic injustices.

In Minnesota, this study finds, 8 percent of Latinos, 10 percent of African Americans, and 29 percent of Native Americans commute to work on public transit, versus just 5 percent of whites and Asian Americans. But thanks in large part to ongoing patterns of development and displacement, low-income communities of color experience not just longer commute times than whites, but shittier service, too:

Infrequent service, indirect routes, delays, overcrowded vehicles, and insufficient shelter at bus stops contribute to the transit time penalty both quantitatively (adding minutes to a trip) and qualitatively (increasing the stress of the experience).

And thanks to a national car-loving ethos that puts roads and freeways above buses and trains, public transportation sucks – across the board! Nationwide, public transit commutes take twice as long as car commutes.

That’s not the only reason just 5.2 percent of U.S. commuters take public transit to work and more than 75 percent drive alone in their cars. But still. As long as there’s a dearth of quick and reliable transit options, it’s going to continue to encourage car ownership. This study points out, for instance, that just 15 percent of jobs in the Twin Cities region have good public transit connections, “resulting in working families in the Twin Cities spending more on transportation than on housing.”

And that is a huge deal when it comes to racial and economic equity. Research shows that access to adequate transportation has an enormous impact on the odds of escaping poverty. Makes sense: an unreliable bus takes a huge toll on your chances of keeping a job. But as one Harvard study suggests, it’s actually commute length that has the biggest impact – beyond crime rates, test scores, or the percentage of two-parent families in a community. According to an article on the study and its implications in the New York Times, “The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.”

So there’s another very good reason to adequately fund public transit, America: Not only will it help the planet, it will seriously improve the lives of lots and lots of low-income Americans.

Source:
Twin Cities Commute Times Show Sizable Racial Gap

, NextCity.

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People of color suffer through extra long commutes

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