Tag Archives: maryland

7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

by SoniaAlarcon Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of Baltimore’s upheaval, President Obama, among others, reminded the country that the city’s longstanding economic inequality was beneath the response to Freddie Gray’s death. “This is not new,” Obama said. “This has been going on for decades.”

In a new study published this week, a group of Harvard economists quantified Baltimore’s problem with economic mobility. Of the 100 largest counties in the country, they found, Baltimore was where children in low-income households faced the worst odds in terms of upward mobility, followed by Mencklenburg, North Carolina; Hillsborough, Florida; Orange, Florida; and Cook, Illinois.

Check out The Upshot‘s interactive map of the Harvard study findings.

That’s just one of many sobering measures of life for some in Baltimore, as the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, and others have pointed out in recent days. Here are a few examples:

Life expectancy in 15 Baltimore neighborhoods, including the one where Freddie Gray lived, is shorter than in North Korea, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. In eight Baltimore neighborhoods, the life expectancy rate is worse than in Syria.

Christopher Ingraham/Wonkblog

Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health conditions and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa, according to recent research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Teens in Baltimore, along with Johannesburg, saw the highest prevalence of sexual violence, substance abuse, depression, and PTSD. They were also most likely to report witnessing community violence.

Vocativ

In 2014, Baltimore—a city where the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) is nearly one and a half times than the national rate (5.5 percent)—had one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in the country, according to the Brookings Institution. The typical Baltimore resident in the bottom fifth of earners made $13,588 in 2013, whereas those in top 5 percent made an average of $166,924 that year.

In 2010, Baltimore had Maryland’s highest rate of arrests for marijuana possession, and Maryland had one of the highest such arrest rates in the country, according to a 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

American Civil Liberties Union, 2010

Baltimore incarcerates a greater portion of its population than New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles County, according to the Justice Policy Institute. It also has one of the highest inmate populations in the country, according to the latest available Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Justice Policy Institute

When it comes to income inequality between blacks and whites, Baltimore is not alone. As FiveThirtyEight reported, this racial disparity is common in cities where at least 10 percent of the population is black.

Ben Casselman/FiveThirtyEight

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7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

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How Many Like Baltimore’s Freddie Gray Have Been Killed in Police Custody?

by DarwinMcintire Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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For many in Baltimore, Freddie Gray’s death was shocking but came as little surprise. It was only a matter of time, some said, before Baltimore erupted the way Ferguson, Missouri, did last summer. While no one knows exactly how many Americans die in police custody each year, limited data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics starts to give some sense of scale: At least 4,813 people died while in custody of local and state law enforcement between 2003 and 2009, according to the latest available report, published in 2011. Sixty-one percent of those deaths were classified as homicides.

As I reported last August in Mother Jones, the BJS collects data on what it calls “arrest-related deaths” that occur either during or shortly after police officers “engage in an arrest or restraint process.” The agency reports that 41.7 percent of those who were deemed to have been killed by police while in custody were white, 31.7 percent were black, and 20.3 percent were Hispanic. (Others died from intoxication, suicide, or by accidental, natural, or unknown causes.)

But you could be forgiven for suspecting that’s not the full picture: There were an estimated 98 million arrests in the United States by local, state, and federal law enforcement from 2003 to 2009, according to FBI statistics. Fifteen states, plus the District of Columbia, did not consistently report deaths in police custody during that period—and Maryland, along with Georgia and Montana, didn’t submit any records at all.

In other words, as the turmoil in Baltimore continues, what the data seems to tell us at this point is just how much we still don’t know.

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How Many Like Baltimore’s Freddie Gray Have Been Killed in Police Custody?

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Even Anti-Gay Activists Predict Victory for Same-Sex Marriage at the Supreme Court

by MarcyHamblin Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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As oral arguments in the highly anticipated gay-marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges got underway on Tuesday morning, hundreds of same-sex-marriage supporters gathered outside the Supreme Court to celebrate what they were convinced would be a major victory. A few dozen gay-marriage foes showed up as well, including members of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, but even they seemed resigned to the fact that their pro-marriage-equality opponents would prevail.

In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court is considering the legality of same-sex-marriage bans; the case turns on the question of whether the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to same-sex marriage and whether states are required to recognize same-sex unions from other states. After the oral arguments, the New York Times reported that the justices were closely divided on whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. A decision is expected at the end of June.

Ben Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church

“I know it’s a fait accompli,” said an unhappy-looking Ben Phelps, 39, a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, the Kansas-based group known for its anti-gay activism and categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Phelps and a small group from his church were protesting on the outskirts of the rally. He held two signs, one that read “God Hates Fags” and the other “Same-Sex Parents Doom Kids.” Phelps predicted the court will rule in favor of same-sex marriage “because we’re in the days of Sodom.”

David Grisham of Repent Amarillo

About 30 yards away, David Grisham, the leader of an anti-gay-marriage group called Repent Amarillo (an outfit the Texas Observer described as a “militant evangelical group that advertises itself as ‘the Special Forces of spiritual warfare'”), shouted into a microphone: “Folks, I’m telling you right now, you’re going to lose your rights if you don’t wake up.”

“I believe the Supreme Court will rule in favor of gay marriage,” Grisham told me after passing the mic to another member of his group. The result, he predicted, would be “persecution for Christians.” He added, “The structure of the family will continue to break down” and “society” will unravel with it.

Gay marriage supporters surround anti-gay protesters.

Grisham and Phelps were in the minority. The overwhelming majority of the crowd had gathered at the court to support marriage equality. “I’m confident,” said Maria Mascaro, 34, who drove down from Philadelphia to attend the rally. “There’s going to be a cocktail after this.”

Albino Periera, 50, and his husband, Joe Kowalcheck, 36, as well as their two dogs, Lola and Nero, made the trip to DC by car from Ormond Beach, Florida. “We’re all very optimistic,” Kowalcheck said. “It would be hard to go backward.”

Nero, gay marriage supporter

Many supporters were optimistic that Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the 2013 opinion striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, would be the swing vote in favor of marriage equality. “Public opinion is so in favor” of same-sex marriage, said Barbara Stussman, 48, of Maryland, whose daughter is a lesbian. “I think Justice Kennedy takes that into account.” During oral arguments, however, Kennedy expressed concern about changing the conception of marriage that “has been with us for millennia,” according to the New York Times.

“I think if Kennedy found DOMA to be discriminatory…he’ll find state bans to be discriminatory too,” said Jeremy Cerutti, 35, a lawyer from Philadelphia. “This is our 1960s moment.”

Opponents of gay marriage likewise see this case as a watershed moment.

“This is the case,” said Grisham of Repent Amarillo. “This is like a Roe v. Wade moment.”

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Even Anti-Gay Activists Predict Victory for Same-Sex Marriage at the Supreme Court

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Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

As politicians, celebrities, and journalists gathered for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night in D.C., just miles away in Baltimore, Maryland, a big crowd marched to protest the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. By Saturday evening, 12 people were reported arrested as some in the largely peaceful crowd threw rocks and smashed windows, and the jumbotron at the Baltimore Orioles game warned fans to stay inside.

But you wouldn’t have known any of that from CNN, which chose to stick with live coverage of every second of the White House dinner. “The most powerful man in the world is going to tell some jokes,” contributor Errol Louis explained, with scenes of the gala in the background. If you wanted to know what was going on with the rallies, you could “find a live feed” somewhere, he said—just not, evidently, on America’s 24-hour news network.

“We sort of make our best choices, and we’ll catch up,” Louis said. “They’ll find out all of what happened in the streets of Baltimore by this time tomorrow.”

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Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

by Celia34Vuvukbw Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Alec MacGillis writes that there was a very specific reason for the surprising Republican win on Tuesday in the Maryland governor’s race:

I knew Democrat Anthony Brown was in trouble in the race for Maryland governor when every single voter I spoke with Tuesday—including several who voted for Barack Obama—at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.

The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian—in Baltimore County, homeowners pay a flat fee that can range from $21 to $39, while commercial property owners are assessed based on the proportion of impervious surfaces (parking lots, roofs, etc.) on their land.

As a native Californian, this naturally brings back memories of the infamous “car tax,” which Arnold Schwarzenegger cynically rode to victory in a special election in 2003. And this wasn’t even a new tax. A few years earlier the vehicle license fee had been lowered under Governor Gray Davis, but with a proviso that it would go back up if state finances deteriorated. Sure enough, when the dotcom boom turned into the dotcom bust, the state budget tanked and eventually Davis signed an order restoring the old VLF rates. But the VLF never actually increased; it merely returned to the same level it was at before it had been cut.

It didn’t matter. Schwarzenegger ran endless TV commercials starring ordinary citizens who simply couldn’t believe that anyone expected them to survive if they had to pay the outrageous Democrat car tax. It was just more than a body could bear. (Yes, that really was the tone of the ads. I’m not making it up.) All this caterwauling was over an average of about $70 in taxes that everyone had been paying with no noticeable distress just four years earlier.

And Arnold won. Cutting the VLF made California’s finances even worse, of course, as did Arnold’s cynical-beyond-all-imagining bond measure a couple of years later to make up for the revenue shortfall. As usual, Californians were somehow suckered into thinking that this was free money of some kind, not something that would cost more in the long run than just paying the VLF in the first place.

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of saying that lots of liberals have spent the past few years predicting the end of the tax revolt. I plead guilty to this once or twice myself. It generally seems to happen whenever some state or another successfully passes a tax for something, but as California showed a decade ago and as Maryland showed yesterday, it ain’t so. I think it’s fair to say that raising taxes is no longer an automatic kiss of death, but it’s still pretty damn dangerous. For the most part, we still live in Grover Norquist’s world.

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

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18-Year-Old Wins State Legislature Seat in West Virginia

by VanceFincham Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Republican Wave lifted many boats last night, including that of 18-year-old Saira Blair. The college freshman was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates in a landslide—she earned 63 percent of the vote to her 44-year-old Democratic opponent’s 30 percent—and officially became the youngest lawmaker in the country. She’ll represent a district of about 18,000 people in the eastern part of the state, near the Maryland border.

The Wall Street Journal describes Blair as “fiscally conservative,” and she “campaigned on a pledge to work to reduce certain taxes on businesses.” Her website boasts an “A” rating from the NRA and endorsements from West Virginians for Life. As a 17-year-old, Blair primaried the 66-year-old Republican incumbent Larry Kump and advanced to the general election—all while legally being unable to cast a vote for herself. Democratic attorney Layne Diehl, her general election opponent, had only good things to say last night about the teenager who beat her: “Quite frankly a 17- or 18-year-old young woman that has put herself out there and won a political campaign has certainly brought some positive press to the state.”

Blair, an economics and Spanish major at West Virginia University, will defer her spring classes to attend the legislative session in the state capital. There, she’ll join her father and campaign manager, Craig, who is a state senator.

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18-Year-Old Wins State Legislature Seat in West Virginia

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

by ReneCogburn Posted on October 20, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s good to be Elizabeth Warren. The senior senator from Massachusetts spent her weekend campaigning for Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, and Iowa, and by all accounts, she tore it up, and got more than a few calls to run for president. (Breaking: she still insists she isn’t going to.) These were some of her biggest red-meat lines from the campaign trail:

1. “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it. We can whine, we can whimper or we can fight back, and we’re here to fight back. We know what we’re fighting for and what we’re up against. We’ve got our voices, or votes and our willingness to fight. This is about democracy, about your future, and about the kind of country we want to build.”

2. “Who does this government work for?…Does it work just for the millionaires, just for the billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers or does it work for the people? That’s the question in this race.”

3. “Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers.”

4. When conservatives came to power in the 1980s, the first thing they did was “fire the cops on Wall Street. They called it deregulation. But what it really meant was have at ’em boys. They were saying in effect to the biggest financial institutions: Any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits.”

5. “They ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says…’I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ We can hang back, we can whine about what the Republicans have done…or we can fight back. Me, I’m fighting back!”

Contrast Warren’s rock star treatment with the President’s reception this weekend: he spoke at a campaign event in Maryland, and attendees filed out as soon as he started speaking. Obama is being kept at arms’ length in close races—Warren, on the other hand, will head to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who’s running against Warren’s old nemesis, Scott Brown.

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

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Why Bother Going Out When the Show Comes Straight to Your Living Room?

by RalfBonilla Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Practically everything about the Washington, DC-based band Paperhaus is homemade: its recording studio, its music venue (the Paperhaus), its business, its songs, its sound—even its Chinese food: “Why order it when you can make it yourself?” Alex Tebeleff explains when I arrive at the band’s northwestern DC home and venue on a recent Monday evening.

As Tebeleff soaks his chicken in a deep fryer, a small black cat named Widget weaves around the amps and drum kits and guitars occupying the room. She arrived one night during a show and never left; Widget and Alex have lived here the longest. The décor is mixed, from a poster of a monkey skeleton to a flowered ceiling lamp—a distinctly homey vibe with a playful spirit. Over the past few years, thousands of fans, hundreds of bands, and countless underground music critics, have flocked here to listen, to enjoy, and make music.

The Paperhaus, arguably the most active and established of the several dozen home venues across DC proper, is a modern remnant of the DIY movement, wherein young artists and music fans, feeling shut out by the professional music industry set about making their own underground version based in people’s living rooms and basements. Home venues are “comforting,” Tebeleff says, in a way that clubs and bars and even converted warehouse spaces tend not to be.

This is hardly an only-in DC thing. Smithereens’s Pat DiNizio played a five month “Living Room Tour” in 2001, for instance. And Seattle Living Room Shows are hosted in secret locations to keep police from catching wind of the DIY venues and shutting them down, but DC hosts some 35 established home venues, tracked by a website called Homestage DC. WAMU, a local public radio station, describes what’s happening here as a local Renaissance—one that Alex and others would love to see spread nationwide.

Paperhaus’ adventures began on a soccer field 14 years ago, in Montgomery County, Maryland, when two middle schoolers met up and started chatting about music. The pair, Tebeleff and Eduardo Rivera, would become the “revolving center” of what is now the band Paperhaus—which shedded more than a few “terrible names” along the way.

Tebeleff, who has lived in the DC area his whole life, books the shows and produces them, and supplements that modest income by teaching guitar. He enjoys chatting about everything from German philosophy to pro football, and will endlessly describe his past and present inspirations: Fugazi, Radiohead, Scott Walker (the singer, not the politician), and Here We Go Magic, to name a few. Danny Bentley is the band’s drummer, and Xaq Rothman its bassist. Tebeleff describes his bandmates as very “family oriented,” especially Rivera, his longtime musical partner. This attitude is reflected in the way the group invites bands and guests into its own home, making them a part of the family. During our chat, at least four or five neighbors and friends pass through the space as though they, too, lived there.

theLAjohnson.com, Courtesy of Paperhaus Facebook

The typical show, Tebeleff says, draws 80 to 100 people into the band’s living room, although more often show up, cramming themselves between the staircase and the stage for the best view.

One of the more prominent live bands in town, Paperhaus also plays at popular bars and venues such the 9:30 Club and The Black Cat—and recently played the Kennedy Center, which usually hosts classical performances. The band has gone on several national tours, playing everything from a little record store in Mississippi on a Monday night to big venues in Atlanta, Georgia, and Raleigh, North Carolina.

So why bother playing their own living room? “When I moved to DC after college,” Tebeleff tells me, “the music scene was very closed off, very exclusive. It bothered me. Music is something that should build community and not isolate it.” The clubs were not only cliquey and hard to break into, they made it practically impossible for bands to rise up: “There’s no middle class for bands anymore,” he says.

What he means is that commercial venues often won’t take a chance on any band that hasn’t proved it can pack a room or merit a pricey ticket. “The reason I started Paperhaus,” Tebeleff says, “was to bring people really interested in music together in a safe space that was open and friendly.”

The band applied that philosophy to the recording of its upcoming album, which entailed long, intense hours together in the Paperhaus improvising riffs and phrases and melodies, and working together to write and compose full songs as a unit. It was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Tebeleff says, and its challenges led to the departure of the band’s original bassist. The album is due out in January. Here’s “Cairo”:

Cairo by Paperhaus

The image Tebeleff hopes to project of Washington, DC, is a departure from the usual power-lunching lobbyists, punditry, and posturing associated with the nation’s capital. “People have a very negative perception of DC a lot of the time because of the politics,” he says. “We try to educate that there’s an entire other scene that couldn’t be more different. We’re not consciously trying to be the antithesis of the political world, though. We want to include them in this. You come to a Paperhaus show and you see punk kids and young professionals, artists and people coming straight from work. The whole spectrum of DC society is becoming aware of it.”

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Why Bother Going Out When the Show Comes Straight to Your Living Room?

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Guess which two words can make your nonpartisan education reforms a hot potato?

by FrancesBolling Posted on July 15, 2014

Guess which two words can make your nonpartisan education reforms a hot potato?

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Depending on who you’re talking to, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)– the first major national recommendations for teaching science to be made since 1996 — either painfully water down the presentation of climate-change information or attempt to brainwash our nation’s youth into believing climate change is real.

The backlash to the NGSS began last year, but now, we also have the backlash to the backlash — an effort by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others, to frame science education as a civil rights issue and mobilize a grassroots movement around the idea of a Climate Students Bill of Rights. The idea is to ensure that the new standards actually wind up getting taught.

If you’re the kind of person who likes geeking out over curricula, you’ll find the NGSS’s website fascinating. How do we teach climate change? It’s such an awkward thing to explain to children, who have not caused the problem and have yet to have a chance to help make it better. Or worse, for that matter.

The standards spell it out, grade by grade. Kindergartners  will learn that “Things that people do to live comfortably can affect the world around them. But they can make choices that reduce their impacts on the land, water, air, and other living things.” High schoolers will learn that “All forms of energy production and other resource extraction have associated economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical costs and risks as well as benefits. New technologies and social regulations can change the balance of these factors. “

It’s up to the states to adopt new educational standards like this. When the feds want to get new educational standards approved, they can pressure states into signing by attaching federal funds to the deal. Because the NGSS standards were developed by a smorgasbord of scientific organizations and the states themselves — or 26 of them, anyway — that financial incentive doesn’t exist. Instead, there’s the motivation that comes from so many states having participated in the process, as well as fears of America’s waning scientific standing.

Attempts to block the NGSS have taken several forms. In Wyoming, state legislators added a last-minute footnote to its state budget that banned the use of any public funds to adopt the new science standards, which effectively removed them from the public school system. In Oklahoma, a group of lawmakers tried to repeal its NGSS-based science standards, but were blocked by the state’s education department, which managed to get the governor to sign off on them.  The NGSS have been adopted by 11 states so far, including California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Rhode Island, Vermont, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington, plus the District of Columbia, though Kansas promptly got sued over it.

I grew up in Michigan, in a suburban community outside of Detroit that was a melting pot of religions, all of which seemed to have objections to scientific education. In general, teachers steered clear of anything more controversial than photosynthesis. Outside of school, I took every chance I could get to (a) read about dinosaurs/space shuttles/stalactites and (b) wish I was a dinosaur/space shuttle/stalactite.

For all that I loved science, it took me years to learn the really important stuff: how to wade through what people want to believe — and what you want to believe — to figure out what can be empirically proven. Here’s hoping that these new standards will help students get to the same place.

Heather Smith (on Twitter, @strangerworks) is interested in the various ways that humans try to save the environment: past, present, and future.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Guess which two words can make your nonpartisan education reforms a hot potato?

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Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

by KlaraGuzm Posted on April 30, 2014

Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

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The EPA has a plan to clean up Chesapeake Bay, which has been polluted by agriculture interests for decades. A “pollution diet” finalized by the agency in 2010 would reduce the amount of animal waste and fertilizer that gushes into the bay from the 64,000-square-mile watershed every year, causing dead zones.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, corn growers, pork and poultry producers, and home builders are fighting that plan in a federal lawsuit, accusing the EPA of making an illegal power grab. Twenty-one states — including Alaska and many others that are nowhere near the Chesapeake watershed — have joined the suit, worried that the cleanup plan could set a dangerous precedent and spread ecological health to their own tainted waterways.

Monday was the deadline for submitting briefs in the case, and fortunately some of those briefs have been in support of the EPA’s plan. Maryland and Virginia, the two states that actually border the bay, are all for cleaning it up. “This lawsuit attacks our efforts to restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay and strengthen its crucial economic value,” said Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler. “Maryland must preserve its partnership with an effective EPA to safeguard our environment and sustain the thousands of jobs supported by the bay.”

Nearby Delaware and Washington, D.C., are in support of the EPA’s plan too, as are six major cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Four Florida conservation groups have also filed a brief in support of the EPA’s plan, making this cogent point: “The heart of the Clean Water Act is the principle that the Nation’s waters cannot be used — directly or indirectly — to dispose of waste. This appeal [by the Farm Bureau] represents a challenge to that principle.”

The case is a big deal, as the Associated Press points out:

Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, says the appeals court ruling could go a long way in shaping environmental policy. “A win will keep intact the EPA’s policy approach, while a loss would not only have an effect on the Chesapeake but similar policies in other parts of the U.S.,” Coglianese said.

The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia is expected to begin hearing oral arguments in the case this summer.


Source
Challenge to Chesapeake Cleanup Tests EPA Power, The Associated Press
Six Major Cities Add Their Support To Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Plan, ThinkProgress

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Why is Alaska fighting the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay?

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