Tag Archives: children

Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

by Hermine1266 Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Reuters reports on lead poisoning:

ST. JOSEPH, Missouri — On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

In explanation, she pointed to the peeling paint on her old house. Kadin, she said, has been diagnosed with lead poisoning. He has lots of company: Within 15 blocks of his house, at least 120 small children have been poisoned since 2010, making the neighborhood among the most toxic in Missouri.

Of course, it’s not just St. Joseph. Reuters got hold of neighborhood-level lead testing records and found thousands of high-lead communities across the country:

Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city’s contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.

The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.

Here’s a map of the worst hotspots in the country:

The whole piece is worth reading. My only disappointment is that the authors spent most of the article talking about the dangers of lead paint. That’s worth talking about, but lead-saturated soil is even more worth talking about. That’s why Lauranda Mignery doesn’t want her son digging in their front yard: there may not be any paint there, but there’s probably lots of old lead that settled in the soil decades ago when we were all burning leaded gasoline.

Sadly, there’s barely any money in the federal budget these days for testing, let alone remediation. It would cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up all the old lead, which is mostly a problem in poor communities populated by people of color. And though it’s not polite to say this, nobody cares enough about them to spend tens of billions of dollars.

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

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One of Hillary Clinton’s faithless electors went to Faith Spotted Eagle. Here’s who that is.

by ArnulfoKaler05 Posted on December 19, 2016

That’s according to a Reuters investigation that analyzed blood tests from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over 1,100 of those communities have lead levels four times as high as those observed in Flint.

Nationwide, the exposure could be much higher: Data was only available for 21 states, accounting for 61 percent of the U.S. population.

The CDC estimates that 2.5 percent of children across in the United States have at least slightly elevated levels of lead, which can lead to lowered IQs, developmental delays, and learning difficulties, as well as miscarriage and premature birth. The local water supply is frequently the source of lead, but some communities are additionally plagued by industrial waste, lead paint, and lead pipes.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump vowed to address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure — including the lead crisis — but many of his cabinet picks have a history of combating legislation that protect public health.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, sued that very agency for using the Clean Water Act to prosecute waterway polluters. According to Pruitt, the Act threatens the “property rights of the average American.” He didn’t mention their brains.

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One of Hillary Clinton’s faithless electors went to Faith Spotted Eagle. Here’s who that is.

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BREAKING: Ivanka Out, Eric & Don Jr. to Take Reins of Trump Biz

by RosalinDeen Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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It looks like Ivanka has been fired:

In a pair of tweets sent after 11 p.m., Trump wrote: “Even though I am not mandated by law to do so, I will be leaving my businesses before January 20th so that I can focus full time on the Presidency. Two of my children, Don and Eric, plus executives, will manage them. No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.”

….Trump’s tweets omitted reference to daughter Ivanka, who, like her brothers, currently works at the Trump Organization. However, Ivanka is expected to step away from the business to serve in an advisory capacity to her father; her husband Jared is a key and trusted aide.

Then again, maybe she’s been promoted. Which is better: being a co-CEO of a crippled Trump Organization, or being acting First Lady because apparently your stepmother doesn’t want the job? That’s a ticklish question. Where’s the chief of protocol when you need him?

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BREAKING: Ivanka Out, Eric & Don Jr. to Take Reins of Trump Biz

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Why Are Children Less Likely to Earn More Than Their Parents These Day?

by JimIrons2455760 Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Even by my standards, the blog has been pretty chart heavy lately. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s to take my mind off the unfolding disaster of Donald Trump. Muddling around in Excel seems pretty soothing by contrast.

(I mean, Trump just told us he’s not going to bother with intelligence briefings at all because “I’m, like, a smart guy.” And as near as I can tell, the entire political class of the country hasn’t exploded en masse. WTF is going on here?)

Ahem. You see the problem? So let’s go back to charts. Recently a team of economists led by Raj Chetty finished a groundbreaking bit of census research that compared incomes of parents at age 30 to their children at age 30. What they found was that children who reached age 30 in 1970 were 91 percent likely to have higher incomes than their parents. However, children who reached age 30 in 2010 were only 50 percent more likely to have higher incomes than their parents.

Why the decline? To demonstrate the answer, I have two charts for you. Here they are, with explanations below:

The chart on the left shows mean real incomes over the past eight decades. The orange lines indicate a guesstimate of standard deviation as a proxy for income inequality. If I keep that standard deviation constant through the years (at about one-third of income), the number of children we’d statistically project to have higher incomes than their parents goes down from 91 percent to 74 percent. The decline is due to the fact that incomes are growing more slowly than they used to.

The chart on the right is identical, except it uses the figures that Chetty’s team came up with based on real-life parents and children. The number of children who actually have higher incomes than their parents declined from 91 percent to 50 percent.

In other words, although some of the effect is due to slow income growth, much more of it is due to something else. And that something else is growing income inequality. Here is Chetty’s chart (note that he uses birth years rather than age-30 years):

The dotted green line shows what reality would be like if income inequality hadn’t gone up. The dotted pink line shows what reality would be like if incomes had continued to grow at their postwar rate. They both make a difference, but income inequality makes a bigger difference.

Now then, since Chetty has a perfectly good chart, why did I bother producing a different one? And not just different, but arguably more confusing than Chetty’s. It’s because I was a little skeptical of Chetty’s results and wanted to work out some things for myself. Gotta do something to keep from thinking about Donald Trump, after all.

But when I was done, my statistical guesses matched Chetty’s empirical figures pretty closely. So I shrugged, and then, having done all this work, I figured I might as well share it. Maybe it just makes things more confusing or maybe it helps. Who knows? But I have to do something to keep from jumping off a ledge, don’t I?

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Why Are Children Less Likely to Earn More Than Their Parents These Day?

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Canada’s Justin Trudeau approved two controversial pipelines and rejected a third.

by WillyMullis Posted on November 29, 2016

All of these Senate floor speeches have urged the same thing since 2012: Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island keeps warning his political peers of the perils of ignoring climate science.

In his 150th speech delivered Tuesday, Whitehouse says:

While the president-elect mocked Republican politicians groveling before the Koch brothers at their “beg-a-thon,” as he called it, he is busy filling his staff with Koch operatives.  Donald Trump may have won the presidency. But with operatives like Myron Ebell, the Koch brothers are moving in to run it.

The new president will hear from our military, our national labs, and NASA (who, with a rover driving around on Mars, may actually know a little science) that this is deadly serious. I encourage President-elect Trump to listen to these voices of reason and expertise, not to the Swamp Things. Don’t be taken in by industry lobbyists and front groups, scratching and clawing to protect a $700 billion conflict of interest.

Trump isn’t keen on listening to scientists, but does seem to care what his family members think. Whitehouse adds, “Consider listening to your children, who joined you just seven years ago in saying climate science was ‘irrefutable,’ and portends ‘catastrophic and irreversible’ consequences.”

Trump and co. really did say that. They signed a letter arguing for global climate action, which Grist uncovered this summer.

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Canada’s Justin Trudeau approved two controversial pipelines and rejected a third.

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Meet the Dark-Money Millionaire Donald Trump Just Tapped to Be Education Secretary

by CyrilTully109 Posted on November 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Betsy DeVos to be his first secretary of education—and, according to Bloomberg‘s Jennifer Jacobs, the Michigan Republican has accepted the job.

Former Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll profiled the DeVos family and its “plan to defund the left” in these pages back in 2014:

The Devoses sit alongside the Kochs, the Bradleys, and the Coorses as founding families of the modern conservative movement. Since 1970, DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of right-wing causes—think tanks, media outlets, political committees, evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups. They have helped fund nearly every prominent Republican running for national office and underwritten a laundry list of conservative campaigns on issues ranging from charter schools and vouchers to anti-gay-marriage and anti-tax ballot measures. “There’s not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the last 50 years who hasn’t known the DeVoses,” says Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.

Betsy is a member of the conservative clan through her marriage to Dick DeVos.

Betsy, who is 56, is the political junkie in the relationship. She got her start in politics as a “scatter-blitzer” for Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign, which bused eager young volunteers to various cities so they could blanket them with campaign flyers. In the ’80s and ’90s, Betsy climbed the party ranks to become a Republican National Committeewoman, chair numerous US House and Senate campaigns in Michigan, lead statewide party fundraising, and serve two terms as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. In 2003, she returned at the request of the Bush White House to dig the party out of $1.2 million in debt. A major proponent of education reform, Betsy serves on the boards of the American Federation for Children, a leading advocate of school vouchers, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which supports online schools.

Read the whole profile.

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Meet the Dark-Money Millionaire Donald Trump Just Tapped to Be Education Secretary

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Oklahomans are suing frackers over earthquakes.

by LatishaWay Posted on November 21, 2016

Residents of Pawnee, Oklahoma, have filed a class-action lawsuit against 27 oil and natural gas companies, alleging that they are responsible for damage caused by earthquakes linked to fracking.

Before the state’s recent fracking boom, earthquakes in the region were relatively rare, but in recent years, Oklahoma has seen thousands of quakes. Many scientists believe the temblors are caused by frackers injecting their chemical-tainted wastewater deep underground.

Pawnee has seen nearly 800 earthquakes in the past year, including a magnitude 5.8 in September, the largest on record in the state. That quake resulted in 289 insurance claims, reports the Tulsa World, but nearly four in five claims made in the area since 2010 have been denied because most homeowners insurance doesn’t cover earthquakes.

The lawsuit alleges that the energy companies have displayed “reckless disregard for public or private safety,” and seeks an unspecified amount for both property damage and emotional distress.

“We have clients who don’t allow their children to go upstairs because they’re afraid the roof will fall in on them,” Curt Marshall, an attorney for the Pawnee residents, told the Associated Press. “There’s a lot of fear; when is the next big one?”

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Oklahomans are suing frackers over earthquakes.

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This Is the Only Recent Time Jeff Sessions Voted to Expand Health Care Coverage

by HoracioLee Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), has voted numerous times against expanded access to health care. He has cast just one vote in recent years to expand health care access. The group he believed deserved better access to coverage? Fetuses.

In 2008, Sessions voted yes on an amendment to remove pregnant women from the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and instead give coverage to the fetus. At the time of the vote, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) described the amendment as follows: “It takes it away from the woman and gives it to the fetus. Now, if the woman is pregnant in an accident, loses the child, she does not get coverage, the child gets coverage.” The amendment failed, with 46 senators voting for it and 52 against it.

It’s the only time in recent years that Sessions has voted in favor of expanding health care coverage—if you can call it that. He voted against expanding access to care for low-income people under Medicare and Medicaid in 2008, against expanding SCHIP to four million children in 2009, and against the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The clear difference, of course, is that Sessions’ vote for fetuses wasn’t really a health care vote; it was an anti-abortion vote.

If confirmed as attorney general, Sessions would have a huge say on the issues of abortion and women’s reproductive health care. Sessions could choose to investigate Planned Parenthood, for example, and defend state and federal policies that make it harder for women to access an abortion or reproductive care.

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This Is the Only Recent Time Jeff Sessions Voted to Expand Health Care Coverage

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In First Public Appearance Since Her Defeat, Clinton Urges Supporters to "Stay Engaged"

by ModestaMoberg Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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In her first public appearance since conceding to Donald Trump last week, Hillary Clinton delivered an emotional speech and urged her supporters to remain committed to fighting for progressive ideals despite her unexpected election defeat.

“I know many of you are deeply disappointed about the results of the election—I am too, more than I can ever express,” Clinton said, speaking to guests at a gala Wednesday for the Children’s Defense Fund, the child’s advocacy organization where she started her career after law school.

“I know that over the past week a lot of people have asked themselves whether America was the country we thought it was,” she said holding back tears. “The divisions laid bare by this election run deep, but please listen to me when I say this: America is worth it. Our children are worth it.”

As the crowd interrupted her remarks with applause and cheers, Clinton also acknowledged that coming to speak at the Washington, DC, event was not easy for her, but her sense of the importance of this work for children and families outweighed the difficulty.

“Stay engaged on every level,” she said forcefully. “We need you, America needs you—your energy, your ambition, your talent. That’s how we get through this.”

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In First Public Appearance Since Her Defeat, Clinton Urges Supporters to "Stay Engaged"

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No, all of your friends haven’t gone to Standing Rock without you.

by HermanOneill Posted on October 31, 2016

That’s according to a new report by UNICEF, which found that nearly one in seven children in the world live in areas where outdoor air pollution is at least six times higher than international guidelines set by the World Health Organization.

The report also found that air pollution — primarily caused by fossil fuel burning, vehicle emissions, waste incineration, and dust — contributes to the deaths of about 600,000 kids under the age of 5 each year. The statistics are most dire in South Asia, where an estimated 620 million children live with dirty air.

Air pollution is especially harmful to children as their lungs are still developing and their respiratory tracks are more permeable than adults’. But as UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake points out, “Pollutants don’t only harm children’s developing lungs, they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains — and, thus, their futures.”

UNICEF is calling for countries to take several steps to minimize risk to kids, including reducing pollution, increasing access to health care, monitoring air pollution levels, and keeping polluting facilities away from schools and playgrounds.

“We protect our children when we protect the quality of our air,” Lake says. “Both are central to our future.”

Excerpt from – 

No, all of your friends haven’t gone to Standing Rock without you.

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