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Obama Just Slapped Down a GOP Attack on Obamacare and Planned Parenthood

by TobyFreeland Posted on January 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama on Friday vetoed a GOP-backed bill that would have fulfilled two conservative dreams all at once: to gut the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature health care law, and to pull funding from Planned Parenthood for a year.

The House passed the bill on Wednesday, after it squeaked through the Senate in December thanks to a special budget process requiring only 51 votes for passage instead of the usual 60. It was the 62nd time that Congress had voted on repealing or gutting the law colloquially known as Obamacare since it became law in 2010. It is also the eighth time in a year that Congress has voted on defunding Planned Parenthood.

Obama said in a statement: “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 22 million after 2017…Reliable health care coverage would no longer be a right for everyone: it would return to being a privilege for a few.”

Referring to Planned Parenthood, the president noted the bill “would limit access to health care for men, women, and families across the nation, and would disproportionately impact low-income individuals.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately responded with a video in which he pledges to hold a vote to override the veto, saying that “it is just a matter of time” before Obamacare is done away with. Republicans do not have enough votes in the House to overturn a presidential veto, which requires a two-thirds majority.

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Obama Just Slapped Down a GOP Attack on Obamacare and Planned Parenthood

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Why North Korea’s Nuclear Test Isn’t Business as Usual

by NealAQPXdtff Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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There’s still plenty of doubt about whether North Korea did in fact detonate a sophisticated hydrogen bomb on Wednesday local time, or if the explosion that triggered a 5.1-magnitude earthquake was a nuclear test more akin to previous ones in 2006, 2009, and 2013. Even as the UN Security Council held an emergency session on Wednesday, the White House said initial US findings were “not consistent with North Korean claims of a successful hydrogen bomb test”—something that would have represented a major ramp-up in North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

But this test was not business as usual for North Korea in one important way, believes Charles K. Armstrong, a leading expert in Korean history and politics at Columbia University: “It’s not clear that they are really interested in using this as a negotiating tactic.”

That diverges somewhat from previous nuclear brinkmanship from North Korea’s leaders. In the past, the international community has managed to cool some of the persistent tensions set off by North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile launches by offering energy and food. That, in turn, was aimed at getting the country’s leaders back to the negotiating table, on a long and fraught road to potential nuclear disarmament. Now, Armstrong explains, Kim Jong Un appears less interested in building leverage for negotiations than in bolstering his internal political clout—and after North Korea’s continued broken promises on nuclear testing, it’s not clear that the United States and its allies could even offer him more enticements.

“There’s not much we can do anymore to increase the economic pressure on North Korea,” Armstrong said in a phone interview Wednesday.

In any case, this time the nuclear test appears to be more geared toward amassing power for the young leader than engineering a way to get much-needed relief. “Number one: They’ve conducted this nuclear test for themselves,” Armstrong said. “Not so much, this time, for the outside world, but to demonstrate the strength of the Kim Jong Un leadership, and the position that they are a force to be reckoned with.”

“I think they are very serious about a nuclear program,” he added. “They do want to engage with the US, in my view, and break out of their isolation and improve their economy, but in a kind of perverse way, they feel this is the best way to do it. They want to negotiate from a position of strength.”

Other North Korea experts have expressed similar sentiments. “North Korea’s armament program is on its own timetable, and it’s not unlikely that every potential new stage is tested out as quickly as possible, regardless of what is going on elsewhere in the world,” B.R. Myers, the author of several books on North Korea and a North Korea analyst at Dongseo University in South Korea, told Slate. “I think the West needs to get away from the habit of regarding the regime’s nuclear tests and ballistic launches as isolated provocations timed to generate maximum attention.”

Nuclear ambitions are key to the regime’s identity, Armstrong says, and shouldn’t be discounted. “The pillar of North Korea’s sense of identity and power under Kim Jong Un is having nuclear weapons,” he explained.

One dominant theory is that North Korea provokes the international community with nuclear and missile tests to try to exact aid as an inducement to calm down. After North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006, the six-party talks between the regime and the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia fell apart, only to come together the following year when North Korea was promised shipments of 50,000 tons of fuel oil in return for a “freeze” of the country’s Yongbyon nuclear facility. But North Korea’s second nuclear test in May 2009 effectively ended discussion of US energy assistance to North Korea.

In 2012, Kim Jong Un promised his country would suspend nuclear tests and allow inspections in exchange for American food aid. But that also fell apart when North Korea launched a long-range missile later that year. North Korea again tested a nuclear device in February 2013.

This time, another key world event might be driving Kim’s decision-making: 2016 will be the first time in 36 years that the entire ruling Workers Party has met for a congress, hosted in the capital in May. “This is a very big deal,” Armstrong told me. “The nuclear test is part of the preparation in a way. It’s demonstrating Kim Jong Un’s strong leadership, and that North Korea is a strong and powerful state in the run-up to his major meeting.”

In this high-stakes game of nuclear chess, Armstrong stresses that it’s important not to lose sight of the North Korean people.

“What I hope does not happen, however, is cutting off of humanitarian aid, because this is really gravely needed by many millions of people in North Korea,” he said. “I would hope there can be a way found to move forward without making the people of North Korea suffer more than they already have.”

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Why North Korea’s Nuclear Test Isn’t Business as Usual

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Chart of the Day: The Uninsured Rate in America Just Keeps Dropping

by IzettaGAPcjcmsew Posted on December 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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I forgot to blog about this when the numbers came out, but the CDC has now updated their survey of the uninsured through the second quarter of 2015. Results are on the right.

The number of uninsured adults under 65 continues to decline, from 10.7 percent in Q1 to 10.3 percent in Q2. Four percent of all Americans under 65 have now purchased health insurance via the exchanges, and many others have purchased Obamacare coverage off exchange. Not bad.

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Chart of the Day: The Uninsured Rate in America Just Keeps Dropping

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Kentucky’s New Governor Wastes No Time in Revoking Ex-Felons’ Right to Vote

by ReedIafajuld Posted on December 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Two weeks before leaving office, the outgoing governor of Kentucky, Democrat Steve Beshear, set up an application process to restore voting rights to the state’s ex-felons. Kentucky is one of three states today that permanently disenfranchise everyone with a felony conviction unless the governor expressly restores the right to vote, a system that disproportionately affects African Americans. The most recent data shows that 5.5 percent of Kentucky’s voting-age population is disenfranchised due to a past conviction—but for African Americans, the number is 16.7 percent.

Beshear’s announcement was expected to give 140,000 disenfranchised ex-felons in Kentucky the right to vote. But only a small number of them were able to take advantage of the new system before Beshear’s successor, Republican Matt Bevin, undid it.

Last week, just before Christmas, the governor issued a series of executive orders scrapping the work of his predecessor, including the restoration of ex-felon voting rights. Bevin’s stated reason for undoing the executive order was that the former governor did not have the authority to change the rules. “While I have been a vocal supporter of the restoration of rights, for example, it is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people,” said Bevin, a tea party favorite. That’s an unusual interpretation of the state constitution, which gives the executive sole power to restore voting rights without any restrictions on how it is done.

The Bevin administration is not shy about claiming executive authority on other matters. On the same day that he ended Beshear’s streamlined process for restoring ex-felons’ rights, he also ended the requirement that marriage licenses bear the name of the presiding county clerk—a concession to Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

“The requirement that the county clerk’s name appear on marriage licenses is prescribed by Kentucky law and is not subject to unilateral change by the governor,” William Sharp, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, said last week in response to Bevin’s order. “Today, however, a new administration claims to have that authority.”

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Kentucky’s New Governor Wastes No Time in Revoking Ex-Felons’ Right to Vote

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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

by GeorgettaEmmons Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The meat industry’s massive appetite for antibiotics just keeps growing. That’s the takeaway from the Food and Drug Administration’s latest annual assessment of the issue, which found that agricultural use of “medically important” antibiotics—the ones that are prescribed to people when they fall ill—grew a startling 23 percent between 2009 and 2014. Over the same period, the total number of cows and pigs raised on US farms actually fell a bit, and the number of chickens held steady. What that’s telling us is that US meat production got dramatically more antibiotic-dependent over that period.

Even more disheartening, medically important antibiotic use crept up 3 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year—despite the FDA’s effort to convince the industry to voluntarily ramp down reliance on such crucial medicines. True, the FDA’s policy, which was first released in 2012, contained a “three-year time frame for voluntary phase-in.” One might have hoped, however, that by 2014, the needle would point downward, not implacably upward.

Note, too, that the last time the FDA saw fit to release numbers on human antibiotic use, in 2011, the total stood at about 3.3 million kilograms. The chart below tells us that farms now using nearly 9.5 million kilograms—nearly three times as much. The news comes in the wake of warnings from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control that the meat industry’s drug habit contributes to a growing crisis in antibiotic-resistant pathogens that kill 23,000 people each year in the United States and 700,000 globally. Then there was the recent news that in China—which has patterned its meat industry on the antibiotic-ravenous US model—a strain of E. coli had evolved on hog farms that can resist a potent antibiotic called colistin, considered a last resort for pathogens that can resist all other drugs.

Here are the numbers:

FDA

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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

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Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at "Slower" Colleges

by ReneHGIzfeasq Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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During oral arguments in a pivotal affirmative action case on Wednesday morning, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia raised the suggestion that African American students might belong at less rigorous schools than their white peers, and that perhaps the University of Texas should have fewer black students in its ranks.

Scalia’s comments came during arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case over whether the university’s use of race in a sliver of its admissions decisions is constitutional. The University of Texas-Austin is being challenged over its use of race in admissions decisions for about 25 percent of its freshman class. About 75 percent of the students at UT-Austin are admitted through what’s known as the Top Ten Percent program, in which any student graduating within the top 10 percent of his or her class is guaranteed admission, regardless of race. The other 25 percent are admitted via a “holistic” process that takes race, and other factors, into account. It’s the “holistic” program that Abigail Fisher—who was denied admission for the university in 2008—is challenging.

The University of Texas has determined that if it excluded race as a factor, that remaining 25 percent would be almost entirely white. During the oral arguments, former US Solicitor General Greg Garre, who is representing the university, was explaining this to the justices. At that point, Scalia jumped in, questioning whether increasing the number of African Americans at the flagship university in Austin was in the black students’ best interests. He said:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.

He went on to say, “I’m just not impressed by the fact the University of Texas may have fewer blacks. Maybe it ought to have fewer. I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”

After a comment like this, Court watchers will really be looking forward to his opinion in the case.

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Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at "Slower" Colleges

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Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation

by LouzConstant Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a Wednesday press conference at Liberty University, a day after the GOP presidential candidates’ most recent debate, co-frontrunner Ben Carson aired his views on one of the race’s most contested topics: immigration. The former surgeon echoed Donald Trump on the magical powers of a heavily policed border fence and pushed back against his rival on the desirability of purging 11 million undocumented people, expressing concern for the plight of “farmers with multi-thousand acre farms” and hotel owners, who, he fretted, would have trouble finding workers to harvest crops and clean rooms.

Then he dropped a whopper. The answer to stemming the (alleged) tide of undocumented workers coming from the south is easy, he suggested: US companies simply need to set up shop in Central and South America and teach them how to farm. His model, he said, is Cameroon, where US agribusiness firms are “helping to develop millions of acres and incredibly fertile land, growing record crops, and getting big profits,” which, he added, “is great for them; I like business.”

These companies are doing well by doing good, he argued, “building the infrastructure of a nation, creating jobs there, and teaching them the ag business so they carry on themselves, while at the same time creating friends for the United States.” And if US firms repeat this feat south of the US border, “people won’t feel the necessity to come here.”

Whoa. First, Cameroon makes an odd model for foreign-led agriculture development. The nation has seen overall food production rise and malnutrition rates drop, but that’s the work of domestic smallholder farmers growing for the local market, not multinationals. Foreign firms have played a large role in converting forest into large palm oil plantations, but those efforts have generated at least as much controversy as “friends for the United States.” The Belgian-owned company Socapalm is locked in a “bitter land rights struggle” with villagers over expansion plans, The Guardian reports. And earlier this month, the government sentenced Cameroon environmental activist and NGO leader Nasako Besing to three years in prison for his role in opposing a hotly contested palm expansion/deforestation project by US firm Herakles Farm.

Then there’s the vexed history of US interventions in Mexican agriculture. The Green Revolution—the effort, funded by US foundations, to bring industrial-style agriculture to the global south—started in Mexico in the 1940s. As the historian Nick Cullather shows in his fantastic 2010 book The Hungry World (which I reviewed here), the Green Revolution did transform agriculture in Mexico’s north. The result: “narrowing of domestic agriculture’s genetic base, supplanting indigenous, sustainable practices; displacing small and communal farming with commercial agribusiness; and pushing millions of peasants into urban slums or across the border.”

Thus Mexico’s Green Revolution experience triggered what 1950s US policymakers would call the “wetback problem”—1.5 million migrants crossing the border each year in search of gainful work, Cullather shows. And that led directly to President Eisenhower’s infamous Operation Wetback, the very round-’em-up-and-purge-them scheme that Carson’s opponent Trump repeatedly trumpeted (though not by name) in Tuesday’s debate.

Of course, the last big wave of Mexican migration was also directly linked to US agribusiness. Implemented in 1994, NAFTA removed trade barriers and inspired Mexican policymakers to withdraw support for Mexican farmers. The result was a flood of subsidized US corn going south, a plunge in corn prices, and a tide of displaced Mexican smallholders heading north, as the Mexican analyst Ana de Ita and others have shown. US firms like Archer Daniels Midland profited handsomely.

In more recent years, though, immigration from Mexico has slowed dramatically, brought down by a variety of factors, from better corn prices in Mexico to less pull from the sluggish US economy. There’s strong evidence that net Mexico-to-US migration (the number of new arrivals minus the number who leave) is at or near zero. You won’t hear Carson or Trump talk about that, or the fact that current undocumented immigrants pay billions in annual taxes, both federal and state/local, in exchange for low-wage labor on farms, in restaurants, etc. On the immigration issue, Carson and his main rival to the GOP presidential throne are spewing noxious fumes about nothing in particular.

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Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation

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A Closer Look at 2016 Obamacare Enrollment

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on October 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Warning: Lotsa numbers ahead. Sorry about that. If you’re not interested, you can skip down to the last two paragraphs for the bottom line.

A couple of days ago, HHS projected that Obamacare exchange enrollment would reach 10 million by the end of 2016. That’s not much higher than the 9.1 million who are expected to be enrolled at the end of 2015. Has Obamacare enrollment stalled?

Maybe. But keep two things in mind:

This is probably a lowball figure. HHS would rather set a low bar and beat it than set a higher bar and have to explain why they missed it.
Charles Gaba, who has a pretty good track record with this stuff, estimates that 14.7 million people will sign up and 12.2 million will remain by the end of the year.

If Gaba is right, that’s an increase of about one-third from 2015. Not too bad. Still, it’s considerably less than the CBO’s original estimate of 21 million enrollees by 2016. Again, though, keep a couple of things in mind:

The CBO figure is for “average annual enrollment.” Since people drop out as the year progresses, this is probably equivalent to about 19 million by year-end.
CBO had estimated a drop of 8 million people from employer and other insurance plans. However, those numbers appear to have turned out lower than CBO’s estimates. This is a good thing—we’d prefer that people stay on their current coverage instead of being kicked off—but it obviously reduces the market for Obamacare enrollment. We should probably reduce CBO’s estimate by 3 million or so to account for this.

In other words, on an apples-to-apples basis, a best guess suggests that we’ll end up 2016 at 12 million compared to a CBO projection of 16 million. It’s still lower than CBO’s original estimates, but not by a huge amount. This could be due to (a) an overestimate by CBO, (b) weak performance by Obamacare, (c) an improving economy, or (d) nothing more than a difference in how fast Obamacare ramps up.

Bottom line: Because of all this, a more reliable metric of success is to skip all the details of who’s insured via what, and simply count the total number of uninsured. CBO originally estimated that the uninsured population would drop to 8 percent by 2016. That estimate changed after the Supreme Court made Medicare expansion voluntary, and CBO now figures that in 2016 the total number of uninsured will come to about 11 percent. The CDC estimates that in the most recent quarter the number of uninsured dropped to 10.7 percent. If Gaba’s numbers are correct, that will decline to about 10 percent or so by the end of 2016.

In other words, once you clear away all the underbrush it looks like Obamacare is meeting or beating its goals. Some of this might be due to an improving economy, but who cares? If the economy is doing well enough that more people are getting employer coverage and fewer are being forced onto the exchanges, that’s a good thing, not a knock on Obamacare.

POSTSCRIPT: Surveys consistently show that about half of the uninsured say they’re not on Obamacare because it’s too expensive. So for anyone who’s truly concerned that Obamacare isn’t hitting its enrollment targets, there’s an easy answer: increase the federal subsidies for the working poor so that more of them can afford coverage.

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A Closer Look at 2016 Obamacare Enrollment

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Silicon Valley Is Even Whiter Than You Thought

by BrentGalbraith Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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The funders behind Silicon Valley’s hottest companies tend to look a lot like the people they invest in: white and male.

Of the 551 senior venture capitalists* examined in a new three-month study by the tech news site the Information and the VC firm SocialCapital, less than 1 percent (precisely four executives) were black, and another 1.3 percent were Hispanic. Twenty percent, or 110 people, were Asian.

While there has been considerable focus on the diversity figures of major companies such as Facebook and Twitter recently, little attention has been paid to the racial and gender makeup of the decision-makers who invest millions of dollars in tech startups, hoping they succeed.

The Information

Ninety-two percent of top venture capital executives are men. According to the report, that’s “way worse” than the gender disparity in tech companies, where 77 percent of leadership roles are occupied by men.

The Information

The striking numbers reinforce the narrative surrounding Silicon Valley’s diversity problems, as companies and civic leaders alike push to improve the racial and gender balance of the companies that make the gadgets and apps we consume. Not all VCs are doing poorly—the 15-person senior investment team at Y Combinator*, the well-known startup accelerator firm, has “four Asian men, a black man, three white women, and an Asian woman,” according to the report. Yet the report found that a quarter of firms have an all-white management crew.

As Mother Jones pointed out in July, the number of African Americans employees at Twitter, Facebook, and Google combined could fit on a single Airbus A830. Now we know the number of black venture capitalists, at least in this study, could fit in an Uber.

In an op-ed Tuesday titled “Bros Funding Bros: What’s Wrong with Venture Capital,” SocialCapital founder Chamath Palihapitiya criticized the backwards nature of the venture capitalist community and called for changes.

“The VC world is cloistered and often afraid of change—the type of change that would serve the world better,” Palihapitiya wrote. “An industry that wields the power to change lives is failing to do just that. Ultimately, fund investors will wake up to this bleak reality. We must change before this happens.”

You can check out the rest of the the Information‘s Future List here.

Correction: Following the publication of this story, Information and SocialCapital corrected several portions of their report, including their description of the racial and gender makeup of Y Combinator’s investment team. The story has been updated to reflect those changes.

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Silicon Valley Is Even Whiter Than You Thought

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

by RoseannSchaeffer Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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New research from the University of Texas—Austin has found that women seeking abortions in cities such as Dallas, Forth Worth, and Austin face staggering wait times of up to 20 days before they can get the procedure. The data, which researchers working for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project released Monday, provides a startling look at the effects of abortion clinic closures in Texas just as the Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to hear a case that could slash the number of remaining clinics by half.

Wait times at abortion clinics in Austin, Texas.

Researchers documented wait times for clinics in Forth Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston from November 2014 to September 2015. In Austin, the average wait over the course of those 11 months was 10 days. In Dallas and Fort Worth, the annual average was 5 days. They also calculated the average monthly wait times and the range of wait times in a given month and found that average wait times within a single month reached up to 20 days in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—where there are five abortion clinics—and wait times for individual patients could reach up to 23 days.

The escalating wait times are a result of successful efforts to close more than half of Texas’s abortion clinics. Most of those clinics were closed by HB 2, a 2013 anti-abortion law that many consider to be the harshest in the nation. Its provisions included a requirement that clinics must have admitting privileges with a hospital no more than 30 miles away. Before the measure, Texas had 41 clinics; four months after it took effect, there were only 22. Today, there are 19.

A final provision of the law, which may be the subject of a Supreme Court battle later this year, would close all but 10 clinics if it goes into effect. That measure requires abortion clinics to be regulated similarly to hospitals, which makes it dramatically more expensive to operate an abortion clinic. Leading medical organizations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, maintain this level of medical infrastructure is not necessary to safely perform most abortions. Whole Woman’s Health, a chain of abortion clinics with several providers in Texas, sued in federal court and succeeded in having the Supreme Court temporarily block the law. The court could make a decision to hear the full case as soon as this month.

A wait time of almost three weeks has serious consequences for women seeking abortions, ranging from her ability to afford an abortion, which becomes more expensive as the pregnancy progresses, to intensity of the procedure. In the second trimester, the cost of an abortion may go up by a hundred dollars every week. The researchers found that if the Supreme Court were to allow all but 10 clinics to close, it would almost double the number of second-trimester procedures in Texas—from 6,600 in 2013 to 12,400.

The researchers also predicted that if the Supreme Court upheld HB 2, the 10 clinics that would remain open would not have the capacity to meet demand. Those clinics today provide only one-fifth of abortions in Texas. If they were the only clinics in Texas, they would probably experience consistent wait times of around three weeks. For instance, the Houston area saw an average wait time of less than five days. But Houston has six clinics. If the law were fully in place, it would only have two clinics. And as clinics closed around the state, the number of abortions taking place in Houston would rise from 3,900 in 2013 to more than 11,000.

Clinics in states bordering Texas are already feeling the crush. Kathaleen Pittman, an official with Hope Medical Group of Shreveport, Louisiana, said in an interview that the proportion of Texans going to Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, Louisiana, has leapt from 15 percent of patients in 2011 to 23 percent in 2014.

And the South isn’t the only region where clinic closures have sent a wave of patients looking for new providers. The problem is also pronounced in Ohio, where eight clinics have closed since 2011. Officials for Preterm, a clinic in Cleveland, say the number of patients traveling from a different part of Ohio has jumped 160 percent, and the number of patients from out of state has almost doubled.

As Mother Jones reported in a recent feature, a clinic called the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in southern New Jersey is seeing more and more patients from Virginia, because clinics in Maryland and Delaware are overbooked, and from the Midwest, because many clinics there have closed. An analysis by Mother Jones found that clinics are closing at a rate of 1.5 per week. If the trend keeps up, the new data from Texas may turn out to be a bellwether for the rest of the nation.

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

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