Tag Archives: rights

Floridians who missed voter registration deadline because of Hurricane Michael are out of luck

by Peggy Mason Posted on October 11, 2018

Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle Wednesday afternoon. The third strongest storm to ever hit the United States, it brought 155 mph winds, heavy rainfall, and towering storm surges. While Floridians in Michael’s path were searching for refuge from the storm’s imminent fury, thousands of would-be voters missed the state’s October 9 voter-registration deadline.

In response, a coalition of civil rights groups including the Advancement Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the American Civil Liberties Union has filed an injunction in federal court against the state. Florida officials refused to further extend the registration deadline, despite issuing mass evacuations and closing down offices in preparation for Hurricane Michael. There have also been mounting complaints about “a mess” in the online registration system — with glitches that could have disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters. The lawsuit calls for the voter-registration deadline to be extended by at least one week statewide.

“Our lawsuit is about protecting the right to vote for people impacted by Hurricane Michael in a moment where state officials have been unresponsive and unwilling to do the right things,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Grist. “It is unreasonable to expect that anyone in Florida will have an opportunity to register and vote when you’re in the storm’s path.”

Considering Florida has a long-standing history of razor-close elections, as well as the high stakes of November’s upcoming election — where climate-related issues like toxic algae blooms and now Hurricane Michael are expected to take center stage — voters who were unable to register could have some political influence on the environmental burdens they and other Floridians face.

According to a new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists out earlier this month, the same communities that suffer from the burden of socioeconomic distress and environmental segregation — such as exposure to air toxins — also often face restrictive electoral laws. Researchers made the connection by examining Congressional election turnout and compared the effect of both socioeconomic, environment, as well as institutional factors on turnout.

“These cumulative inequalities add up and make it very difficult for those who are most in need of protecting their interests in their community from actually having a voice in the political process,” said Michael Latner, lead author of the analysis and a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow.

Researchers found that the lowest voter turnout happens in vulnerable communities and communities of color. “You get this cumulative effect such that you’ve got environmental injustice inequalities — that is, the burdens of environmental pollution and degradation — more concentrated among people of color and economically burdened communities,” Latner told Grist.

The areas affected by Hurricane Michael are some of Florida’s poorest. Gulf County and Franklin County have some of the highest poverty rates in the state at 23.5 percent and 23.1 percent, respectively. (Florida’s overall poverty rate stands at 14 percent, per the U.S. Census.) Calhoun County, just inland of where the storm made landfall, has a poverty rate of 21 percent. It’s also the county with the lowest median household income in the state — less than $32,000 per year.

“People who are economically depressed, in many ways, have less of a voice,” said Donita Judge, senior attorney and co-director of the Power and Democracy Program at the Advancement Project, one of the groups that brought suit against the state. “When some communities catch a cold, poor communities catch pneumonia. It’s always worse for them to overcome.”

This is not an isolated instance. Back in 2016, civil rights groups also sued the state after its refusal to extend the voter registration deadline during Hurricane Matthew. “Everybody has had a lot of time to register,” said Florida Governor Rick Scott at the time. Scott is currently on the ballot for one of the state’s two seats in the Senate.

But Scott’s response ignores the fact that, historically, there are spikes in voter registration rates right as a deadline approaches. In 2016, after a court ordered an additional one-week extension of the statewide deadline to accommodate those affected by Matthew, more than 100,000 additional Floridians registered.

Of course, Florida is not the only state facing allegations of voter suppression. Texas, which has some of the worst voter registration and voter participation rates, rejected 2,400 online voter registrations before the October 9 deadline. In Georgia, 53,000 voter registrations — of which nearly 70 percent belonged to African-Americans — are in limbo after the state’s Republican candidate for governor, who is also its current secretary of state, began overseeing an “exact match” registration verification process.

On Sunday, Florida’s Secretary of State Ken Detzner authorized election supervisors in select counties to accept paper registration applications whenever their offices reopen. But considering that prolonged recovery efforts follow soon after devastating hurricanes, civil rights groups feel this “limited, confusing, and inconsistent” solution was insufficient.

As human-induced climate change continues unchecked, disasters the likes of Michael are becoming the norm. “From Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Michael, these past few years make clear that climate change is having an impact on our country,” Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said. “Election officials should do a better job at having emergency plans in place that safeguard the rights of voters.”

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Floridians who missed voter registration deadline because of Hurricane Michael are out of luck

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The U.N.’s watchdog on indigenous rights has her eye on climate change initiatives

by AXIJacinto Posted on September 13, 2018

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, fights a complicated climate battle. She’s a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people of the Philippines, and it’s her job to monitor threats being posed to indigenous communities and report her findings to the U.N. human rights council.

And there are many fronts to those threats: Fossil fuels push indigenous communities from their territories and destroy the ecosystems they depend on, all while a warming world threatens their traditions and livelihoods. Renewable energy is an important solution, but it has also caused harm — from companies grabbing tribal lands to governments criminalizing indigenous activists who oppose new energy projects, says Tauli-Corpuz.

Tauli-Corpuz highlighted the opportunities and risks that need to be navigated in the transition towards a fossil fuel-free future during an affiliate avent at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. The event highlighted work by the Right Energy Project, an international collaboration that aims to provide 50 million indigenous peoples with access to renewable energy by 2030. The project also advocates for renewable energy that respects human rights.

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Energy is key for indigenous peoples achieving self-determined development, Tauli-Corpuz said during the panel. There’s a high demand for renewable energy projects in those communities, she added. But the U.N. special rapporteur noted an important caveat: “I have been to several countries where renewable energy projects are put in place but without consulting indigenous peoples, without involving them in planning, and without them benefiting from it.”

In the worst cases, indigenous leaders have been targeted and killed for their opposition to controversial energy projects billed as “renewable.” She pointed to the death of Honduran activist Berta Caceres, who was killed while mounting a campaign against a large hydroelectric dam. “This is one example of how to do it wrong, how to approach renewable energy projects in a deadly way,” Tauli-Corpuz said. She submitted a report to the Human Rights Council this month on the criminalization of indigenous peoples defending their rights. Tauli-Corpuz herself was accused of terrorism by the Government of the Philippines: “How will we get stronger solidarity when indigenous peoples are subjected to those kinds of treatments?” she asked.

Tauli-Corpuz said that a human rights-based approach to renewable energy means that local people are consulted and that free, prior and informed consent is obtained — the standard established in the United Nations’ International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

Grist also asked Tauli-Corpuz what her hopes and expectations are as the Global Climate Action Summit unfolds.

She pointed to Tuesday’s announcement that foundations were committing $450 million for forest conservation and protection. The anti-deforestation efforts are supposed to boost indigenous peoples’ rights and opportunities in the process. “Donors said that indigenous peoples’ rights should be respected and violence against them should be stopped,” Tauli-Corpuz said.” For me as a rapporteur, I think those are very good indications.”

Still, Tauli-Corpuz will be keeping a close eye on how this shakes out: “How will we make sure these funds will go directly into the communities? In our experience, if there are announcements like that, big intermediaries come into the picture and eat up 80 percent of the budget and 20 percent only is left with the indigenous peoples.”

Finally, she pointed to the various partnerships between local governments, the private sector, foundations, and indigenous peoples: “Those are the areas which need much more work.” Throughout the week, indigenous activists are holding protests and coordinating their own programming to bring forth community-led solutions and demand participation in policy-making.

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The U.N.’s watchdog on indigenous rights has her eye on climate change initiatives

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More Than One in Three Black Students in the South Attend an Intensely Segregated School

by WallyValliere Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the progress made toward dismantling segregated schools in the South, once the most integrated region in the country, seems to be steadily falling apart.

A report released this week by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project and Penn State University’s Center for Education and Civil Rights finds that in 2014, more than one in three black students attended a school in the South that was intensely racially segregated, meaning a school where 90 percent of students were racial minorities—a 56 percent rise from 1980. The report also finds that the number of Latino students enrolled in public schools in the South surpassed black enrollment for the first time ever, making up 27 percent of the student body. That’s significant, as the percentage of Latino students in the South attending an intensely racially segregated school is also on the rise—42 percent in 2014, up from 37 percent in 1980.

The result, the report notes, is that the typical student faces decreasing exposure to a race other than his or her own. The average black public-school student in the South in the 2014-2015 school year went to a school that was 27 percent white, while the average white public-school student attended a school where black students made up 15 percent of those enrolled. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, segregation doesn’t get any better when poverty is taken into account: Black, Latino, and low-income students saw a rapid increase in exposure to poverty in the last decade as compared to their white and Asian peers.

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While the problem is getting much worse in the South, it’s far from confined to the region. Last year, a US Government Accountability Office report concluded that nationally the number of high-poverty public schools—or those where at least 75 percent of students were black or Hispanic and at least 75 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-lunch—more than doubled between 2001 and 2014. The GAO report also found that the country saw a nationwide rise in the percentage of schools separated by race and class, from 9 percent to 16 percent, in the past decade and a half. These stats are further supported by a new report released on Thursday by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which finds that black and Latino students in the 2014-2015 school year disproportionately attended high-poverty schools; while 8 percent of white students attended high-poverty schools across the country, nearly half of black and Hispanic students did so.

This is a massive problem as research has shown that students who attend integrated schools score higher on tests and are more likely to enroll in college. Moreover, as the GAO report notes, high-poverty schools have tended to provide fewer resources and opportunities to minority students.

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Erica Frankenberg, co-director of Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights and the co-author of the report, says that as court oversight of school districts has diminished, some have returned to relying on neighborhood schools, an act that could perpetuate segregation if housing around the neighborhood is also divided. Consider a place like Charlotte, North Carolina, where a 1971 Supreme Court decision resulted in the implementation of a mandatory busing program for kids in Mecklenburg County in an attempt to make schools there more racially balanced. Over three decades, the district became a model for integration across the country. That lasted until 2001, when a legal challenge resulted in the program’s end. The district turned to a student-assignment plan that let students attend schools in their neighborhoods, confining them to institutions in areas long shaped by housing segregation.

Making matters worse are recent efforts from communities to break away from larger metropolitan school districts. The break-away communities tend to be whiter and wealthier than the larger district, and when they leave, they take funding gained from property taxes, in turn negatively impacting the students left behind. Most recently, for instance, a federal judge in Alabama allowed members of the city of Gardendale to establish its own school district, beginning with two elementary schools, despite concluding that race motivated the community’s actions. A forthcoming report by the non-profit EdBuild finds that of the 45 successful attempts to split from larger school districts since 2000, 17 occurred in the South.

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What sticks out most to Frankenberg, however, is the rapid growth of charter schools in the South. She noted that growth of enrollment in charters in the region outpaced that of the rest of the country. The number of charter schools in the region has actually quadrupled to more than 700,000 in the past decade, enrolling 4.4 percent of all students in the South in 2014. While black and Latino students make up most of the students enrolled in charters in the region, the percentage of charters’ white students has fallen over the past decade. Mirroring what’s happening in traditional public schools, black and Latino students in charters are, on average, less exposed to white peers. The average black student in a charter school, for instance, attends a school with 16 percent white student enrollment.

That lack of exposure, coupled with the pace of charter-enrollment growth, Frankenberg says, has helped drive the overall pattern of segregation in the region. In the 2007-2008 school year, just Florida and Louisiana had more than 3 percent of students enrolled in charters in the region. Now, they are joined by North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, and South Carolina. And though private school enrollment in the South and nationally has been declining since 2001, 1.2 million kids in 2011, the most recent year of available data, were still enrolled in private schools in the South—70 percent of whom were white.

So, as the Trump administration doubles down on an investment in promoting school choice nationally—at the expense of after-school programs, subsidized loans, and other deep proposed cuts—the report recommends state officials not let communities break away from school districts and suggests policymakers ensure school-choice programs are implemented in such ways that encourage integration. Unfettered choice without careful design could lead to further segregation, just like it did in the South decades ago and, more recently, in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ home state of Michigan.

“Our lost progress on segregation for southern black students, and our failure to ever confront segregation for Southern Latino students, has to be a wakeup call for the region’s leaders,” Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a co-author of the report, said in a statement.

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More Than One in Three Black Students in the South Attend an Intensely Segregated School

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Against the Odds, Members of a Refugee Caravan Are Let Into the US

by NumbersSanborn Posted on May 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last weekend, dozens of refugees who participated in a caravan that traversed Mexico to seek asylum in the United States, presented themselves at the San Ysidro port of entry in Tijuana and were admitted into the United States. Planned by a coalition of Mexican and American organizers, the caravan began in early April at the Guatemala-Mexico border. Its goal was to raise awareness of the dangers migrants face while traveling through Mexico as well as the reportedly widespread practice of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents illegally turning back refugees at the border. The group reached Tijuana last weekend after suffering a variety of threats and setbacks during nearly four weeks on the road.

In total, 78 asylum seekers were admitted during the weekend border crossing. The group included men, women, and children, most of whom were fleeing violence in Central America. Alex Mensing, one of the caravan organizers and a paralegal at the University of San Francisco’s Immigration and Deportation Defense Law Clinic, says that several families were released on parole to family members and sponsors in the country, while the rest have been sent to immigration detention centers or are in the custody to of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Only one asylum seeker was turned away at the border, Mensing says. A child with US citizenship crossing with his Guatemalan father was sent back to Mexico when border patrol learned his mother was still there. “Once they found out the mother was in Tijuana, they called her and told her that if she didn’t come get her son, they would take the child away and put him in foster care.” (Under international law, separating children from their parents usually should be avoided, according to the detention guidelines outlined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.) There were also allegations of refugees receiving poor treatment in CBP custody. Los Angeles resident Dolores Ramirez, who had relatives traveling in the caravan, told the local news outlet KPBS that her relatives were “only getting 10 minutes to eat, they have no blankets, they’re sleeping on the floor in cells, they’re being yelled at… They shouldn’t be treated like animals, they’re not animals, they didn’t cross the border illegally, they’re seeking help.”

Cristobal Sanchez

Not all of the refugees who turned themselves in last weekend had traveled with the caravan. Several, having already been turned back by CBP multiple times, waited in Tijuana to cross with the group.

According to multiple human rights attorneys and a new report from Human Rights First, CBP has been turning away more asylum seekers since the election of President Donald Trump. “In the wake of the election and President Trump’s January executive orders relating to refugees, CPB agents have in some cases claimed the United States is no longer accepting asylum seekers,” Human Rights First reports. By blocking refugees, CBP may be putting them in direct danger. The report adds, “Cartels, smugglers, and traffickers—who control areas around border crossings and wait outside some ports of entry where they see migrants and asylum seekers as easy prey—have kidnapped, raped, and robbed asylum seekers wrongly turned away by the U.S. government.”

B. Shaw Drake, a fellow at Human Rights First and one of the authors of the report, has heard reports that CBP officers turned away two Eritrean refugees on the day after the caravan members turned themselves in. “We had hoped our report and all the media attention would have put them on notice,” Drake says. “But we continue to hear about those cases happening.”

Mensing says that while the caravan was by and large a success, he has concerns that the practice of turning back asylum seekers will continue unchanged. “There’s no doubt in mind that of those 78 people, most if not all of them would have had difficulty being processed if it had not been for the caravan. And clearly, if they were back to rejecting people on Monday, it was not a lasting thing, either.”

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Against the Odds, Members of a Refugee Caravan Are Let Into the US

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Trump’s New Labor Nominee Oversaw Politicized Hiring at Justice Department

by LienGalarza Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

At a press conference Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump announced Florida International University College of Law Dean R. Alexander Acosta as his next nominee to oversee the US Department of Labor. The decision comes after a slew of scandals and mounting pressure from Republicans derailed Trump’s previous pick, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, who withdrew his name from contention on Wednesday, a day before his confirmation hearing was scheduled.

Trump lauded Acosta’s credentials as a Harvard Law School graduate, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and a member of the National Labor Relations Board, emphasizing that Acosta had previously been confirmed by the Senate three times. “I’ve wished him the best,” Trump told reporters. “I think he’ll be a tremendous secretary of labor.” If confirmed, Acosta would be the only Latino in Trump’s Cabinet.

But Trump didn’t mention one of Acosta’s less admirable roles. Acosta served as assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2003 to 2005 under President George W. Bush—the first Latino in that role—and was at the center of a scandal over hiring practices. During Acosta’s tenure, Brad Schlozman, a deputy assistant attorney general, “improperly considered political and ideological affiliations” when he hired attorneys to work at the Civil Rights Division, according to a Justice Department inspector general report written in 2008. “Attorneys hired by Schlozman were more than twice as likely to be Republican or conservative than those attorneys Scholzman was not involved in hiring,” the report found. That consideration, the report concluded, violated the Civil Service Reform Act and department policy that bars discrimination in hiring based on political and ideological affiliations.

The agency concluded that Acosta and other Civil Rights Division managers failed to “exercise sufficient oversight to ensure that Schlozman did not engage in inappropriate hiring and personnel practices.” Specifically, Acosta and Deputy Attorney General Wan Kim “failed to ensure that Schlozman’s hiring and personnel decisions were based on proper considerations,” the report noted.

When Acosta first took over as law school dean in 2009, H. T. Smith, director of FIU’s trial advocacy program, told the Miami New Times that Acosta’s stint at the Civil Rights Division “caused a rift with the black community,” adding that the former Miami prosecutor needed to meet with faculty members to heal that divide. The NAACP’s Miami-Dade branch expressed concern, telling the Miami Herald at the time of Acosta’s hire that his “lack of diversity in hiring and promotion while serving as U.S. attorney gives cause for concern for his consideration as dean of FIU’s College of Law.”

Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, condemned the “egregious conduct” that played out during Acosta’s time at the Justice Department. “It is hard to believe that Mr. Acosta would now be nominated to lead a federal agency tasked with promoting lawful hiring practices and safe workplaces,” Clarke said in a statement released after Trump’s announcement.

Read the full 2008 inspector general report:

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Justice Department Inspector General Report Acosta Hiring Practices (PDF)

Justice Department Inspector General Report Acosta Hiring Practices (Text)

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Trump’s New Labor Nominee Oversaw Politicized Hiring at Justice Department

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Reproductive Rights Activists Are Mad as Hell Over This Creepy New Abortion Rule

by MorrisWeathers9 Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Center for Reproductive Rights, a reproductive rights legal advocacy organization, has filed a lawsuit to stop a regulation in Texas that would require fetal remains to be buried or cremated from taking effect. The state’s Heath and Human Service Commission quietly proposed the rule last July, days after the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt struck down two requirements of HB2, a Texas law designed to drastically reduce access to abortion. The Texas law had already led to the closure of half the abortion clinics in the state. Pro-choice advocates say the new rule regarding fetal remains is meant to further limit women’s control over their reproductive lives.

“These insidious regulations are a new low in Texas’ long history of denying women the respect that they deserve to make their own decisions about their lives and their healthcare,” said Nancy Northup, the president of CRR, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. The rule is set to go into effect December 19, but opponents argue the requirement will add burdensome costs and logistical challenges to reproductive health care services, likely adding an additional $2,000 to the cost of an abortion, according to the Funeral Consumers’ Alliance of Texas. This would make accessing reproductive services prohibitively expensive for low-income women, many of whom have lost access to affordable birth control thanks to Texas cutting public funds from Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.

â&#128;&#139;The parts of HB2 that had been struck down by the Supreme Court—the requirement that doctors have admitting privileges to local hospitals and that abortions be performed in surgical centers rather than clinics—were framed as efforts to protect women’s health. Proponents of the new measure have a different argument to justify the regulation. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has argued fetal remains shouldn’t be treated like medical waste and, according to a report by the Texas Tribune, has used this stance to raise campaign funds. â&#128;&#139;”I believe it is imperative to establish higher standards that reflect our respect for the sanctity of life,” he wrote in the fundraising email. “This is why Texas will require clinics and hospitals to bury or cremate human and fetal remains.”

Texas lawmakers are expected to codify the regulation into law when they meet in January 2017. Northup argues the Supreme Court already ruled medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion unconstitutional. “The Center for Reproductive Rights will continue to fight for Texas women, and women across the nation, to ensure their rights are protected,” she promised.

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Reproductive Rights Activists Are Mad as Hell Over This Creepy New Abortion Rule

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Pat Buchanan Defends Donald Trump

by MauriciWestall Posted on October 22, 2016

Mother Jones

Jay Nordlinger and I don’t agree on much, but I’ve never held that against him. However, with 17 days left until we go to the polls, I do hold against him the five minutes of my life that I lost from reading Pat Buchanan’s latest column. But you know what? If I have to suffer, so do you. Ladies and gentlemen, here is Buchanan’s latest defense of Donald Trump:

What explains the hysteria of the establishment? In a word, fear.

….By suggesting he might not accept the results of a “rigged election” Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots. For none of the three — diversity, equality, democracy — is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Pledge of Allegiance.

….Some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in “Points of Rebellion”: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.” Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love, elitist enthusiasm for “revolution” seems more constrained.

Nordlinger comments:

Around the world, there are many, many places that lack the “niceties of liberal democracy.” You don’t want to live there. You would quickly discover that the niceties are more like necessities — a rule of law necessary to live a good, decent, and free life.

Is this just garden-variety Buchanan? It’s been years since I’ve read or listened to him. He’s always been a bit of a lunatic, but it seems like he’s gotten even crazier in his old age.

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Pat Buchanan Defends Donald Trump

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

by DieterBainton Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2009, trains arrived in Uniontown, Alabama carrying four millions tons of coal ash, the toxic residue from burning coal. The ash was recovered from a spill in Kingston, Tennessee—a town that is more than 90 percent white—and brought to a new landfill less than a mile from the residential part of Uniontown, which is 90 percent black. Soon, Uniontown residents began reporting breathing problems, rashes, nausea, nosebleeds, and more.

“The smell, the pollution, and the fear affect all aspects of life—whether we can eat from our gardens, hang our clothes or spent time outside,” resident Esther Calhoun later said.

Uniontown residents filed a complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights in 2013, alleging that the waste was disproportionately affecting black property owners. By allowing the landfill to exist, they said, Alabama was violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandates that federeal funds not be used in a discriminatory purpose. The EPA is supposed to respond to such complaints within 6 months. Three years after filing the complaint, Uniontown residents are still waiting for an answer.

The story is one of many detailed in a scathing report by the US Commission on Civil Rights, a government watchdog group, on the EPA’s “long history” of not effectively enforcing its anti-discrimination policies. “EPA does not take action when faced with environmental justice concerns until forced to do so,” it reads. “When they do act, they make easy choices and outsource any environmental justice responsibilities onto others.”

For years, critics have accused the EPA of neglecting communities of color, pointing to cases from toxic air in Richmond, California to lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

The report sheds light on why this might be the case: Despite receiving early 300 discrimination complaints since 1993, the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights has “never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history,” the report found. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity found that it takes the EPA a year, on average, to decide to accept or dismiss a Title VI omplaint, and that the agency dismisses or rejects the discrimination complaints in more than 9 out of 10 cases.

Much of the US Commission on Civil Rights report focuses on coal ash, which typically contains arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals that are “associated with cancer and various other serious health effects,” according to the EPA. The ash is America’s second largest industrial waste stream (after mining waste), with 130 million tons generated each year—more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Until recently, the coal ash was typically dumped in unlined pits and covered with water, sometimes contaminating local water sources.

In 2014, the EPA came out with the first ever a coal ash storage rule—after environmental groups sued the agency for evading its responsibility to revise its waste regulations. The regulations say that new coal ash pits must be lined, and unlined pits need to be cleaned up—but only if they’re connected to active power plants and found to be polluting groundwater. What’s more, the rule doesn’t allow federal enforcement, leaving lawsuits as the only mechanism of ensuring that the guidelines are followed.

The US Commission on Civil Rights report took issue with these weaknesses, saying the rule “requires low-income and communities of color to collect complex data, fund litigation and navigate the federal court system—the very communities that the environmental justice principles were designed to protect.”

It recommends that the EPA bring on additional staff to respond to discrimination complaints and handle the current backlog (some cases are decades old). It calls for the agency to classify coal ash as hazardous waste, test water near coal ash ponds in poor and minority communities, and study the health effects of the waste. It also points out that all this will be difficult without funding from Congress—currently, only eight EPA staff members are directly responsible for Title VI compliance.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA said that the report had “serious and pervasive flaws” and included factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of EPA findings. Mustafa Ali, environmental justice advisor to EPA head Gina McCarthy, said, “EPA has a robust and successful national program to protect minority and low-income communities from pollution.”

In places like Uniontown, Alabama, it’s hard to see evidence of such a program. “EPA is more focused on process than on outcomes; more focused on rhetoric than results,” wrote commission chairman Martin Castro in in the report. “By any measure, its outcomes are pathetic when it comes to environmental justice.”

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

by LucaHanlon Posted on September 9, 2016

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

See the article here – 

Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

As the Potomac River rises, cherry trees planted along the sloped bank will drown, row by row.

by ShawnaZQSraf Posted on September 9, 2016

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

Read this article: 

As the Potomac River rises, cherry trees planted along the sloped bank will drown, row by row.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As the Potomac River rises, cherry trees planted along the sloped bank will drown, row by row.