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This is What It’s Like to Be a Muslim Schoolkid in America Right Now

by PenneyEstep Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Are you part of the 9/11 or are you ISIS?” “Did you ever kill anyone?” “Are you going to bomb this place?” These are some typical questions that 12-year-old Abdu Rrahman Mohamed says he’s been asked by his non-Muslim classmates week after week in his Long Beach, California, school, he told youth radio VoiceWaves.org last week.

Earlier this year, a high school teacher in Richmond, Texas, sent all his students home with a new study guide he had created, with the title, “Islam/Radical Islam (Did You Know).” In the study guide, which had not been approved by the school, the economics teacher presented fictional statements as if they were facts, including, “38% of Muslims believe people that leave the faith should be executed.” The teacher also wrote up instructions for what to do “if taken hostage by radical Islamists.”

In Weston, Florida, a high school French teacher allegedly called one 14-year-old Muslim student a “rag-head Taliban” in February. The student’s father, Youssef Wardani, a software engineer and an immigrant from Lebanon, said his son, an honor roll student, now hates going to school.

These are not isolated incidents. The federal government, leaders of Muslim organizations, many Muslim students, and parents report an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric and abuses in classrooms.

Last week, during an event hosted by the nonprofit organization Muslim Advocates, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch expressed concerns about what she sees as an uptick in anti-Muslim incidents in schools. The Department of Justice has partnered with the Department of Education to advise schools on anti-bullying measures. Lynch added that the DOJ is investigating MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas; the school in September called the police and suspended 14-year-old Ahmed Muhammad when he brought a clock he had made to school, to show it to his engineering teacher. School administrators assumed it was a bomb.

Recent figures from a 2014 California survey of students by the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CA) show that 55 percent of Muslim students in California reported being the target of verbal abuse and insults. That’s twice as many students as those who report being bullied based on gender and race nationally. The survey also found that 29 percent of students who wear a hijab reported offensive touching or pulling of their headscarves. One student said, “They would call me a terrorist and ‘towel head’ and throw rocks at me.” Another student reported, “Someone threatened to kill me if I went to school on 9/11.”

Research shows that students who are bullied do worse academically, and abuse can reappear later in life; former victims have reported struggles with depression and anxiety, as well as risks of suicide.

Perhaps most concerning in the figures and news reports is the number of anti-Muslim incidents that have originated from teachers and administrators, as was the case with Ahmed in Irving. One in five Muslim students in California said they experienced discrimination by a teacher or an administrator. Of these, only 42 percent said reporting a problem to an adult made a difference.

This poses a challenge for advocates and parents who are working to combat Islamophobia in schools. While students, especially in high schools, play a large role in combating any form of meanness and abuse at their schools, adults play a greater role in setting the tone of their classrooms and enforcing positive social norms.

The rise in bullying of Muslim students is a reflection of the rising Islamophobia in the United States since 9/11. As Mother Jones‘ Edwin Rios reported last week, “The most recent FBI data indicates that hate crimes based on race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation have dropped across the board—with the exception of crimes against Muslim Americans. In 2014, even as the total number of hate crimes dipped nearly 8 percent from the year before, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 14 percent.” And on Sunday, the New York Times‘ Laurie Goodstein found that in the aftermath of attacks in Paris and the mass shooting in San Bernandino, California, “Muslims and leaders of mosques across the United States say they are experiencing a wave of death threats, assaults and vandalism unlike anything they have experienced since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.”

(Are you a Muslim student who doesn’t feel safe in your school, or is your school a good model that others should learn from? I’d love to hear from you. Email me at krizga at motherjones.com.)

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This is What It’s Like to Be a Muslim Schoolkid in America Right Now

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The Meat Industry Is Killing Kids, Say Pediatricians

by HarrisLilly775 Posted on November 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to the National Pork Producers Coalition, the way the meat industry currently uses antibiotics is no problem. “Existing FDA regulations are increasingly strict and provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance,” the group insists on its website.

But Jerome Paulson and Theoklis Zaoutis disagree. Pediatricians who serve on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Environmental Health, they have published a blunt report in the journal Pediatrics, arguing that systemic overuse of antibiotics in livestock production is a key driver of the resistance crisis, which, they show, sickens 2 million Americans every year, kills 23,000, and runs up an annual healthcare bill of $21 billion annually.

With their developing immune systems, children are particularly vulnerable—salmonella alone causes more then 120,000 illnesses, 44,000 physician visits, 4600 hospitalizations, and 38 deaths annually among kids younger than five, the authors report.

They point out that US livestock producers uses a staggering 32.2 million pounds of antibiotics in 2012 (the last year for which data exist), more than four times the amount used to treat people. Fully 60 percent of the those farm-dispensed drugs “are considered to be important in human medicine,” they add. This annual bombardment of farm antibiotics, they show, kills susceptible bacteria and allows resistant ones to proliferate. Of the Salmonella that commonly show up in the US meat supply, 5 percent are are resistant to 5 or more classes of antibiotic drugs—and 3 percent can withstand ceftriaxone, the “first-line therapy for salmonellosis in pediatrics,” the authors note.

Paulson and Zaoutis then run through the various ways these superbugs move off of farms and threaten people. “Increasingly, food animals are raised in large numbers under close confinement, transported in large groups to slaughter, and processed very rapidly,” they write. “These conditions can cause increased bacterial shedding and contamination of hide, carcass, and meat with fecal bacteria.” Resistant bacteria can also escape the farm through farmers, farm workers, and farm families, and casual visitors, who then can spread the germs throughout the communities. Then there’s the vast concentrations of manure from these facilities, which “can contaminate foods when manure containing resistant organisms is applied to agricultural soils and the organisms are then present in farm runoff.”

They end with a critique of what those pork producers claim are “increasingly strict” FDA rules on farm antibiotic use. Currently, the rules allow farmers to use antibiotics not only to treat to disease but also “prevent” it—a loophole that, as I and others have shown, allows meat producers to maintain current practices. That practice “can harm public health, including child health, through the promotion of resistance,” the authors warm. Who are you going to believe—the folks charged with keeping your kids healthy, or the ones charged with profitably churning out billions of meat animals each year?

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The Meat Industry Is Killing Kids, Say Pediatricians

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The Time Jeb Bush Hired a Spanking Proponent to Run His Troubled Child Welfare Agency

by EnriqueKeisler Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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It was 2002, Gov. Jeb Bush was up for reelection, and the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) was in chaos. News had recently broken that a five-year-old Miami girl in state care had disappeared—and no one had noticed her absence for more than a year. Police had recently found a child welfare worker passed out drunk in her car with a kid in the back seat. A two-year-old boy was beaten to death on the same day a caseworker claimed to have visited him. The department head had quit amid a series of controversies. Bush needed a replacement, one that signaled that he had a plan to restore order to the scandal-plagued agency. But his choice to fill the job, Jerry Regier, a Christian conservative culture warrior who had served in Bush’s father’s presidential administration, soon landed in a controversy of his own involving spanking.

Regier held a range of hardline religious views and supported the use of corporal punishment against children. He was the founding president of Family Research Council, the social conservative group that has denounced homosexuality and defended the rights of parents to physically discipline their children. (FRC was co-founded by James Dobson, an influential psychologist who, starting in the 1970s, wrote numerous parenting books touting the value of using a switch or belt on defiant children.)

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The Time Jeb Bush Hired a Spanking Proponent to Run His Troubled Child Welfare Agency

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Here’s How Much Pollution Volkswagen’s Smog Scandal Produced

by RebekahCanipe03 Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Volkswagen isn’t going to get away with this. You don’t (allegedly!) fake emissions data for a few million cars and just walk away. But what the German automaker’s punishment will be, and how much it’s going to hurt—those are still open questions.

The final decision will be up to lawyers at the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice. That latter agency has opened a criminal probe into the company’s (alleged!) emissions software tampering shenanigans. But based on precedent and the outlines of what Volkswagen actually seems to have done, we can make a few predictions.

If US officials absolutely throw the book at VW, EPA rules stipulate a maximum fine of $37,000 per affected car. At 482,000 cars on American roads, that comes to $18 billion. But according to attorneys who work on these kind of cases, that number is way too high for what’ll actually happen. The biggest fine of this kind to date was $1.2 billion, a criminal penalty that Toyota paid in 2014 for concealing information about faulty ignition switches that triggered sudden accelerations.

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Here’s How Much Pollution Volkswagen’s Smog Scandal Produced

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America’s 25 Top Restaurant Chains, Ranked by Antibiotic Use

by VivienToj4865049 Posted on September 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Heads up, meat eaters: A new report has rated the antibiotic use in the meat of 25 top fast-food or “fast casual” restaurants, and the results are, well, concerning. The report by Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and four other consumer health organizations, examined antibiotic use as well as the restaurants’ transparency about their meat and poultry supply chains. Chipotle and Panera were the only chains to publicly report serving a majority of meat from animals raised without routine antibiotics.

“Chain Reaction,” by Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, et al

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls antibiotic resistance one of the top five health threats facing the nation, killing an estimated 23,000 Americans each year. “When livestock producers administer antibiotics routinely to their flocks and herds, bacteria can develop resistance, thrive, and even spread to our communities, contributing to the larger problem of antibiotic resistance,” the report explains. “The worsening epidemic of resistance means that antibiotics may not work when we need them most: when our kids contract a staph infection (MRSA) or our parents get a life-threatening pneumonia.”

In addition to sending each company a survey, the report authors examined company websites and other publicly available information. They intend for the report to be updated annually as companies change their practices.

Here’s a rundown of what researchers had to say about each restaurant (emphasis added):

Panera and Chipotle are the only chains that publicly affirm that the majority of their meat and poultry offered is produced without routine use of antibiotics.
Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s have established policies limiting antibiotic use in their chicken with implementation timelines.
Dunkin’ Donuts has a policy covering all meats but has no reported timeline for implementation.
While Starbucks has made positive statements supporting what it terms as ‘responsible use of antibiotics to support animal health,’ to our knowledge the company has failed to adopt a clear policy prohibiting routine use of antibiotics in its meat and poultry supply chains or to provide detailed public information on their purchasing practices.
While Subway did not respond to our survey, recent news outlets report that the company’s goal is to ‘eliminate the use of antibiotics in products across the menu’ and that Subway is ‘targeting to transition to chicken raise without antibiotics important to human medicine in 2016.’…It is unclear whether this would entail the end of all routine antibiotic use in its supply chains.
Burger King, Wendy’s, Olive Garden, KFC, Chili’s, Sonic, Denny’s, Domino’s, Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Applebee’s, Jack in the Box, Arby’s, Dairy Queen, IHOP, Outback Steakhouse, and Little Ceasars either have no disclosed policy on antibiotics use in their meat and poultry, or have policies that in our estimation allow for the continued, routine use of antibiotics in the production of all meats they serve.

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America’s 25 Top Restaurant Chains, Ranked by Antibiotic Use

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Obama’s Climate Plan Just Won Another Key Victory in Court

by AntoniaDavison Posted on September 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, President Barack Obama released an early version of his plan to crack down on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants—the cornerstone of his climate change agenda. Right away, a dozen coal-reliant states and coal companies fired back with a pair of lawsuits aimed at blocking the plan from going into effect. The challenges failed: A federal court in DC ruled that they would have to wait until the rules were finalized.

They tried again last month, when the final details were announced. But this afternoon, they got smacked down again because the rules, while now final, still haven’t been published in the federal register (that process typically takes months). Here’s the ruling:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/2392311-obamas-clean-power-plan-just-won-an-important.js”,
width: 630,
height: 400,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-2392311-obamas-clean-power-plan-just-won-an-important”
);

Once again, the complaining parties were just too eager to chomp at the bit, said David Doniger, director of climate policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Counting this challenge, the previous one, and several prior attempts to squelch Obama’s climate plan, he said, “they’re batting 0-8 in premature challenges.”

“It’s not a great track record. You don’t want to bring a succession of losing cases, because you get a bad reputation before the court.”

The battle isn’t over yet: You can count on the same cast of characters trying the same shenanigans when the rule is finally published sometime in October.

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Obama’s Climate Plan Just Won Another Key Victory in Court

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Vladimir Putin Says He Wants to Join the Fight Against ISIS

by TorstenTipper Posted on September 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Russia is a longtime supporter of the Assad regime in Syria, but lately the flow of military aid from Russia to Syria has been on the rise. Apparently this has given rise to scuttlebutt that Vladimir Putin may be hoping to lure the US into a joint effort to fight ISIS:

Observers in Moscow say the Russian maneuvering could be part of a plan to send troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State group in the hope of fixing fractured ties with the West….By playing with the possibility of joining the anti-IS coalition, Putin may hope to win a few key concessions. His main goal: the lifting of Western sanctions and the normalization of relations with the United States and the European Union, which have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the Ukrainian crisis.

….Sergei Karaganov, the founder of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a leading association of Russian political experts, said that Russia was considering the possibility of joining the anti-IS coalition, but the West so far has been unwelcoming. “They are reluctant to accept proposals from Putin, whom they want to contain,” he said.

Karaganov, who has good connections among the Russian officials, said he doesn’t expect Russia to opt for unilateral military action in Syria if it gets the cold shoulder from the U.S. and its allies. “It would involve enormous risks,” he said.

This sounds mighty weird. Even Putin can’t seriously imagine that the US and Iraq would join a Putin-Assad alliance, no matter what its goal is. I wonder what’s really going on here?

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Vladimir Putin Says He Wants to Join the Fight Against ISIS

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Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

by KamDennison87 Posted on August 11, 2015

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

By on 11 Aug 2015commentsShare

To raucous applause of denialists everywhere, Australia submitted its climate pledge to the U.N. on Tuesday. The plan — immediately and nearly universally hailed as weak by climate hawks, climatologists, and most other reasonable people — is one of twenty-six voluntary greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges, covering more than fifty countries, filed in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Paris this December. While currently non-binding, these Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) are considered indicative of countries’ levels of ambition in responding to the global climate change dilemma.

Australia committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. Compare this target to the European Union’s: 40 percent of 1990 levels — when global emissions were much lower — by 2030. While Australia’s pledge may look similar to that of the United States, which committed to a cut of 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025, analysts at Australia’s Climate Institute project that the U.S.’s pledge will amount to a 41 percent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030. Canberra’s five years of wiggle room make for a significant break for fossil fuel companies.

Weak target aside, “even worse is the lack of policy instruments outlined to get us there,” argued Yannick Spencer, an Australian Master of Public Policy candidate at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, in an email to Grist. “In fact the policy instruments in place will get us nowhere near there, while being highly economically inefficient.”

The Australian INDC leans heavily on the government’s US$1.86 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, the country’s main climate strategy, even though analysts expect it to be “fully eroded” (read: out of money) by next year. The fund operates via a reverse auction, in which companies offer to undertake emissions-cutting projects and bid for taxpayer dollars to fund those projects. Not only is the fund running out of money, but its impact is dubious. The policy suite will allow Australia’s top 20 polluters to actually “increase their carbon emissions without penalties,” reported the Australian Financial Review.

Despite the backlash, the Australian government stuck to its coal-fired guns. “Australia is making a strong and credible contribution to the international effort to tackle climate change,” said Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a statement. “We are committed to tackling climate change without a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme that will hike up power bills for families, pensioners and businesses.”

Ignoring the fact that the INDC is neither strong nor credible, the position is at least a step up for Abbott, who previously called climate change “absolute crap.” (The PM also notably said, “I won’t be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated,” but we’ve only got time to cover one type of denialism today.)

Coal made up more than 60 percent of Australia’s energy mix in 2014. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private-sector coal company, quoted Abbott in a recent submission to the White House Council on Environmental Quality protesting the inclusion of greenhouse gases in National Environmental Policy Act analyses:

As Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently explained, … “Coal is good for humanity. Coal is good for prosperity. Coal is an essential part of our economic future here in Australia.”

The same can’t be said for the rest of the South Pacific. “If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear,” said Tony de Brum, foreign minister for the Marshall Islands, in a statement addressing Australia’s INDC. “So would my country, and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”

Source:
Australia Sets Emissions Goal, but Climate Scientists Say It Falls Short

, The New York Times.

Anger as Australia unveils ‘weak’ climate pledge

, RTCC.

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Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

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One City Tried Something Radical to Stop Gun Violence. This Report Suggests It’s Working.

by MckinleGain Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year I told you about a radical new approach to reducing gun violence in Richmond, California, a city that had suffered for years under the toll of one of the nation’s highest homicide rates. The city threw money and police at the problem, but the rate of fatal (and non-fatal) shootings remained. The human toll was staggering. In 2007, the low point, there were 45 homicides involving a firearm in the city of 106,000. Finally, it decided to try something entirely new:

Richmond hired consultants to come up with ideas, and in turn, the consultants approached Devone Boggan. It was obvious that heavy-handed tactics like police sweeps weren’t the solution. More than anything, Boggan, who’d been working to keep teen offenders out of prison, was struck by the pettiness of it all. The things that could get someone shot in Richmond were as trivial as stepping out to buy a bag of chips at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Boggan wondered: What if we identified the most likely perpetrators and paid them to stay out of trouble?

In late 2007, Boggan launched the Office of Neighborhood Safety, an experimental public-private partnership that’s introduced the “Richmond model” for rolling back street violence. It has done it with a mix of data mining and mentoring, and by crossing lines that other anti-crime initiatives have only tiptoed around. Four times a year, the program’s street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves. ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While ONS is city-funded and has the blessing of the chief of police, it resolutely does not share information with the cops. “It’s the only agency where you’re required to have a criminal background to be an employee,” Boggan jokes.

It was a crazy idea. But since ONS was established, the city’s murder rate has plunged steadily. In 2013, it dropped to 15 homicides per 100,000 residents—a 33 year low. In 2014, it dropped again. Boggan and his staff maintained that their program was responsible for a lot of that drop-off by keeping the highest-risk young men alive—and out of prison. Now they have a study to back them up.

Read our 2014 story on Richmond’s ambitious plan to bring down its homicide rate. Photograph by Brian L. Frank

On Monday, researchers from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a non-profit, published a process evaluation of ONS, studying its impact seven years in. The conclusion was positive: “While a number of factors including policy changes, policing efforts, an improving economic climate, and an overall decline in crime may have helped to facilitate this shift, many individuals interviewed for this evaluation cite the work of the ONS, which began in late 2007, as a strong contributing factor in a collaborative effort to decrease violence in Richmond.”

As evidence, the study cites the life-changing effect on fellows. Ninety-four percent of fellows are still alive. And perhaps just as remarkable, 79 percent have not been arrested or charged with gun-related offenses during that time period.

“While replication of the Fellowship itself may be more arduous because of the dynamic leadership associated with the current model, the framework of the Fellowship could be used to improve outcomes for communities across the country,” the study’s authors wrote. “The steps taken to craft programming developed with clients in mind, and being responsive to their needs and the needs of the community, can serve as a model.”

Read the full report here.

Originally posted here – 

One City Tried Something Radical to Stop Gun Violence. This Report Suggests It’s Working.

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Solar Power Is Mostly for the Affluent. Here’s Obama’s Plan to Spread the Wealth Around.

by DarinRRZscwoob Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rooftop solar power systems cost a lot less these days than they did five or 10 years ago, and with many solar companies now offering leases and loans, it’s safe to say that going solar is more affordable than even before. That trend goes a long way to explaining why solar, while still making up less than 1 percent of the total US energy mix, is the fastest-growing power source in the country.

But access to solar power is still overwhelmingly skewed toward affluent households. Of the roughly 645,000 homes and business with rooftop solar panels in the US, less than 5 percent are households earning less than $40,000, according to a report earlier this year from the George Washington University Solar Institute. The typical solar home is 34 percent larger than the typical non-solar home, according to energy software provider Opower.

President Barack Obama wants to change that. On Monday the White House announced a package of initiatives to make solar more accessible for low-income households. The plans include a new solar target for federally subsidized housing and an effort to increase the availability of federally insured loans for solar systems.

Low-income households face a number of barriers to going solar. They’re less likely to own their own roof, less able to access loans or other financing options for solar, and more likely to have subsidized utility bills that don’t transfer the financial benefits of solar to the homeowner. And yet, in many ways low-income households stand to benefit the most from producing their own energy: The proportion of their income spent on energy is about four times greater than the national median, according to federal statistics. And because lower-income households tend to use less electricity overall than higher-income households, a typical solar setup covers more of their demand. The GW study found that a 4 kilowatt solar system, about the average size for a house, would cover more than half of a typical low-income household’s energy needs and that if all low-income households went solar, they would collectively save up to $23.3 billion each year.

“This is aimed at taking directly on those challenges and making it easier and straightforward to deploy low-cost solar energy in every community in the country,” senior White House climate advisor Brian Deese told reporters in a call yesterday.

The initiative starts by tripling the target for solar on federally subsidized housing to 300 megawatts by 2020, as well as directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide technical guidance for state and local housing authorities on how to go solar. The White House also announced more than $520 million in commitments from private companies, investors, NGOs, and state and local governments to pay for energy efficiency and solar projects for low-income households. The initiative places particular emphasis on so-called “community” solar, in which groups of households pool resources to build and maintain a shared solar system in their neighborhood.

Some states and power companies are already angling to support solar for low-income housing. Arizona Public Service, a Phoenix-area utility, recently launched a $28.5 million program to install its own solar panels on rooftops in its service area, specifically targeting low-income households. And New York’s electricity regulators recently bolstered incentives for power companies that invest in energy efficiency and renewables. Con Ed, the power company serving most of New York City, plans to spend $250 million on such upgrades in Brooklyn and Queens, as an alternative to a $1 billion upgrade to the old natural gas-fired electric grid.

The president’s plan builds on a commitment he announced earlier this year to train 75,000 workers for the solar industry (which is already adding jobs 10 times faster than the overall economy). It also dovetails neatly with Obama’s larger climate objectives, especially his hotly-contested plan to reduce the nation’s energy-related carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030, as well as the economy-wide climate targets that form the US bargaining chip for this year’s UN climate negotiations in Paris.

For all those promises to work, “the question is how states and utilities can reduce their emissions, and the buildings that they serve are a critical part of that system,” said Natural Resources Defense Council financial policy analyst Philip Henderson. “Making those buildings more efficient and using less energy from dirty power plants is a direct and essential way to meet those goals.”

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Solar Power Is Mostly for the Affluent. Here’s Obama’s Plan to Spread the Wealth Around.

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