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Soda Companies Have a New, Evil Language Trick to Keep You Hooked on Sugar

by JuliaBuley Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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I live in Oakland, California, and lately I’ve been getting flyers at my house with images like this:

No Oakland Grocery Tax

Have you ever heard of a “grocery tax?” If not, that’s probably because most people know it by another name: soda tax.

I’ll get back to the brilliant rebranding in a second, but first, a little background: Once considered a radical idea, soda taxes are gaining momentum. Philly passed one in June. In November, soda taxes will be on the ballots in San Francisco, Oakland, and possibly Boulder, Colorado.

In all of these places, the basic idea is essentially the same: Drinking sugary beverages leads to obesity, diabetes, and a host of other health problems. Since soda companies target residents of poor neighborhoods, particularly people of color, those people end up disproportionately getting sick from drinking too much soda. The tax makes sugary drinks (not just soda, but any drink—juices, iced tea, etc.—with added sugar) more expensive, which in theory discourages people from buying them. The money the cities raise from the tax goes toward programs, like free preschool, that help the people that sodas hurt.

Of course, soda companies are not big fans of these taxes. And they’re dipping into their deep pockets to fight them: The last time a soda tax was on the ballot in San Francisco, the American Beverage Association, the soda industry’s lobbying group, spent $9.1 million to defeat it. And it worked.

That’s partially because ABA employs some marketing geniuses—which brings us back to the phrase “grocery tax.” ABA argues that’s an accurate description because of the way soda taxes are structured. The tax doesn’t actually apply directly to the sugary drinks that you buy at the store. Instead, they’re a tax on the distributors who sell sugary drinks to store owners. The distributor usually passes the tax on to the store owner, in the form of higher wholesale prices. Store owners can then decide to make up for that cost however they want. If they want to hike the price of soda, that’s cool. But if they want to keep the price of soda the same and instead raise the price on, say, a bottle of water or a bunch of kale, that’s totally fair game.

“That means whether you purchase soda or not, you could be seeing a big impact on your grocery bill,” says the No Oakland Grocery Tax website.

Not everyone agrees. Three members of the Oakland City Council have accused the No Oakland Grocery Tax campaign of misleading citizens. Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan told me over the phone that the campaign has “been lying to the voters of Oakland by trying to scare them into thinking that someone is going to tax their groceries.”

So who’s right? The question is whether store owners will apply the tax just to sugary beverages or spread it out to other groceries as well. Joe Arellano, spokesman for the No Oakland Grocery Tax campaign (which is funded by ABA), says his group has done spot checks on stores in Berkeley and found that store owners aren’t raising the prices on soda. When I asked for evidence, he sent me a bunch of photos showing diet and regular sodas priced the same (diet sodas are exempt from the tax because they’re sugar free), though he didn’t provide the kind of before-and-after documentation that showed that prices stayed the same after the tax went into effect.

Meanwhile, that team of University of California-Berkeley public health researchers studying the tax has found exactly the opposite: Most store owners in Berkeley actually have raised the prices on sugary drinks, the group reported. Two other groups of researchers had similar findings. (And it’s worth pointing out that those three studies were all peer reviewed, unlike the spot checks that No Oakland Grocery Tax has conducted.)

I talked to a few store owners in Berkeley this past weekend. Some said they had raised soda prices since the tax went into effect, some said they hadn’t. Among those who hadn’t, a few reported raising prices on other goods to make up for the difference. None of them were wild about the tax. Adel Gergess, the owner of a convenience store called Alex Market, told me that beverages make up a whopping 40 percent of his sales. He did the math, and he figured out that he couldn’t raise the prices on sodas or any other groceries, or he’d lose too much business. So he ate the cost himself. But it’s been really tough.

“We’ve been in the business like 19 months and we lost a lot of money,” he said. “Ninety percent of the beverages we have—even the organic or natural ones—have sugar.”

Soda tax proponents hope that the demand for sugary drinks will continue to fall, and that store owners will eventually ditch soda in favor of more popular items.

There’s some evidence that the plan is working. In a just-published study by a team at the University of California-Berkeley, researchers found that since the city of Berkeley enacted the nation’s first-ever citywide soda tax last year, soda consumption in poor neighborhoods has declined by 21 percent. A lead researcher called the findings “very encouraging.” It also showed that people were drinking 63 percent more water. (A caveat: Other factors may have contributed to the switch from soda to water—most notably, a public awareness campaign in Berkeley about the unhealthiness of soda.) Another hopeful sign: After Mexico passed a nationwide soda tax, soda sales decreased 12 percent, while bottled water sales rose by 4 percent.

The bottom line: The “grocery tax” argument has some truth to it—and so far, it’s certainly put owners of markets and restaurants in a bind. On the other hand, preliminary research on soda taxes—which shows that they actually might actually discourage people from drinking sugary beverages—is promising.

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Soda Companies Have a New, Evil Language Trick to Keep You Hooked on Sugar

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Please: Donald Trump Is Not "Courting the Black Vote"

by TerrenceJefferie Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is the Wall Street Journal today:

Donald Trump Courts Black Vote While Avoiding African-American Communities

Donald Trump for the last week has been asking for support from African-American voters who have long backed Democrats, but his campaign has for months rebuffed invitations from supporters for the Republican presidential nominee to appear before black audiences.

….Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said he has passed along requests from historically black colleges for Mr. Trump to speak….“You don’t go to a white community to talk about black folks. Hello, it doesn’t make sense.”

Ms. Manigault,1 who was appointed to her position in July, said she would answer questions about her work for the Trump campaign over email but then didn’t respond to emailed questions. Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In a way, I guess I feel sorry for the authors of this piece. I mean, it’s obvious what’s going on. Trump couldn’t care less about black votes. His speeches are aimed like a laser at his white base, using language carefully calculated to assuage their fear of being called racist if they support him. Nobody in their right mind would give the speeches he gave if they were truly trying to address African-Americans.

But even though this is obvious to everybody, Reid Epstein and Michael Bender can’t come right out and say it. They can sort of imply it, if you’re smart enough to read all the hints in their piece. But most people probably aren’t that savvy. They’ll just see yet another back-and-forth about process and strategy in the Trump campaign and then turn the page.

I don’t know what the answer is. Tossing objective reporting onto the ash heap of history isn’t the answer. It’s extremely useful to have people who at least try to write neutrally. And yet, too often this gets in the way of reporting plain facts. So what should we do about this?

1This would be Omarosa Manigault, a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice. She is now Trump’s director of African-American outreach, which should give you a pretty good idea of just how much he cares about the black vote.

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Please: Donald Trump Is Not "Courting the Black Vote"

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My Social Security Reform Plan: One-Third-One-Third-One-Third

by AntonSynnot Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Atrios says that 401(k) retirement plans have been a disaster:

The current system has failed, and the exciting plan to “fix” the failed system is run the same experiment, with minor tweaks, over for another 40 years and see how that works. Of course if you just grab your trusty envelope back and do The Math, the pittance people will save in these exciting new plans will be just that, a pittance.

This is a common view on the left, usually delivered with no evidence because it’s considered so obvious that no evidence is needed. On the occasions when there is evidence, it’s usually something about the stock market being in bad shape circa 2010.

So let’s take a look at the evidence. I’ve put all of this up before, but not in one place. So let’s collect it. Here’s chart #1:

Retirement-age folks have done better than any other age group since 1974, and way better since 2000. So far so good. Here’s chart #2:

This is Social Security’s projection of median elderly income over the next 25 years. It looks pretty good too. There’s no evident crisis in these numbers. And this is not from some think tank with an axe to grind. It’s from the Social Security Administration’s MINT projection, which is probably the most comprehensive look we have at all sources of income among retired folks. Here’s chart #3:

This comes from the Center for Retirement Research, a decidedly liberal outfit. They’ve been a longtime proponent of the view that 401(k) plans are worse than old-style defined benefit pensions, but last year they revisited this question using better data. What they found is that for the past 30 years, pension wealth has stayed steady even as 401(k) plans have become more popular and DB plans have gone the way of the dodo (except in the public sector, where they’re still common). In other words 401(k)s aren’t a failure.

My final bit of data, sadly, doesn’t lend itself to chart format, so we shall have to use words instead. In 2006, Congress passed the Pension Protection Act, something that most critics of 401(k) plans seem to ignore—or perhaps are blissfully unaware of. In the past 10 years, it’s accomplished the following:

Allowed companies to automatically enroll workers (subject to an opt-out), thus increasing the number of people with 401(k)s.
Made 401(k)s more accessible to small businesses.
Increased 401(k) participation considerably among young workers and low-income workers, who need them the most.
Encouraged the use of lifecycle funds, the best type for retirement plans.

Put all these things together, and there’s very little evidence for any kind of broad retirement crisis. Retirement readiness in America seems to be about the same as it’s always been.

Does that mean everything is hunky-dory? Of course not. 401(k) fees are still too high, something that I’d dearly love to see Hillary Clinton address with new federal regulation. It’s probably also true that old-style pensions were a little more generous for low-income workers than 401(k)s, though the evidence on this score is fuzzy. What’s more, although retirement readiness is no worse than it’s been in the past, it’s not really any better either. In particular, folks at the bottom of the income ladder still don’t participate much in 401(k) programs and rely entirely on Social Security, which is pretty stingy for low earners.

My answer to this is Kevin’s One-Third-One-Third plan. That is, Social Security payments for the bottom third should be increased by a third. This would make a huge difference to the lowest-income workers, but at a pretty reasonable price. My back-of-the-envelope chicken scratchings suggest it would cost about $20-30 billion. That’s politically within reason.

There’s one other change I’d like to see, but I’ll leave that for another time. In a nutshell, there really doesn’t appear to be any kind of broad-based retirement crisis. 401(k) plans have performed decently and are likely to perform even better in the future. Our biggest retirement problem is with the lowest-income workers, and that could be fixed at a pretty modest cost if we could only muster the political will to do it.

UPDATE: I really wanted my plan to be called “One-Third-One-Third-One-Third,” but I couldn’t think of a third “One-Third.” However, @Noman suggested raising the Social Security earnings cap to pay for my plan, and it turns out that an increase in the cap of one-third would raise roughly $30 billion. Isn’t it great when a plan comes together?

So now it’s the One-Third-One-Third-One-Third plan: payments to the bottom third should be boosted one-third by raising the earnings cap one-third. Take that, Herman Cain.

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My Social Security Reform Plan: One-Third-One-Third-One-Third

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Wisconsin’s GOP Tried to Make It Harder to Vote. Their Plans Just Got Shot Down.

by Chong0688314236 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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A panel of three federal judges on Monday denied Wisconsin’s request to block an earlier court ruling that struck down several voting rights restrictions in the state including cuts for early voting hours, a requirement that cities have only one location for early voting, residency requirements aimed at limiting college students’ votes, and a number of restrictive voter ID requirements.

This decision means many more people in Wisconsin will be able to cast a ballot in November, and the state will be forced to provide state-issued IDs for those who might have had problems assembling paperwork in order to get identification.

Only one way remains for the restrictive laws to stay in place, Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote on his blog Monday. Wisconsin would have to immediately file an emergency stay request with the US Supreme Court. “Even then, getting over the 4-4 ideological split seems iffy,” Hasen wrote, saying that it is unlikely the state would attempt to appeal to the entire 7th Circuit Court of Appeals after Monday’s decision by three of the circuit’s judges.

This ruling follows the July 29 decision by Judge James Peterson in which he described the state Legislature’s attempts to limit voting rights as demonstrating that “a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.” Wisconsin officials asked the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay Peterson’s ruling on August 12, a request the three judges denied on Monday.

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Wisconsin’s GOP Tried to Make It Harder to Vote. Their Plans Just Got Shot Down.

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Is the Louisiana Flooding More Devastating Than Hurricane Sandy?

by BeckySoria Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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The relief effort in Louisiana is ramping up after 10 days of monumental flooding. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama will visit Baton Rouge to survey the damage and find out how the federal government can help. The Red Cross has repeatedly described the flooding as “the worst natural disaster to strike the United States” since Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012.

But for those who aren’t on the ground in Louisiana, it can be difficult to understand what that really means. Here are some numbers that compare the two disasters.

Deaths and damaged homes: Thirteen people have died and about 60,000 homes have been damaged in the flooding that began in Louisiana on August 12. As of Friday, the Obama administration listed 20 parishes in the state as disaster areas, making federal funding available to assist those communities. Hurricane Sandy had a bigger death toll, claiming 72 lives in the United States and damaging 200,000 homes. But that storm hit a much wider swath of land, including metropolitan centers like New York City, whose population is nearly double that of the entire state of Louisiana.

People in shelters: When you compare the storms in terms of the numbers of people in shelters, the situation is similar.

“The Red Cross has mobilized our largest sheltering and feeding effort since Superstorm Sandy with the flooding in Louisiana,” said Molly Dalton, a spokeswoman for the humanitarian organization. “It’s the largest volume of people in need of emergency shelter in the last four years…In addition, FEMA has reported really high numbers of people registering for emergency assistance, which is another indicator we’re going by.”

About five days after Hurricane Sandy, she said, the Red Cross had 11,000 people in 250 shelters across 16 states. One week into that relief effort, it had about 7,000 people in shelters, “and we’re seeing about the same over the last week” in Louisiana, Dalton said on Friday. “Thursday night we had 3,900 people in 28 shelters, but at the peak of the response we had 10,000 people in 50 shelters in Louisiana. So it’s going down, but there are still a lot of people in shelters.” Sunday night, the Red Cross had nearly 3,000 people in 19 shelters across the state.

Looking at the big picture, the Red Cross and partners have provided more than 40,000 overnight stays since flooding began in Louisiana. That compares with 74,000 overnight stays during the entire relief effort for Hurricane Sandy, and 3.8 million overnight stays for Hurricane Katrina victims who where spread across 27 states.

“It’s not possible to estimate the full impact of the Louisiana floods this early in the response, and every disaster is different, so it would be difficult to make any comparison to past disasters,” another Red Cross spokesperson told Mother Jones on Monday. “But we do know that this is going to be a massive response.”

Meals served: “So far in Louisiana in the first week, we’ve served 158,000 meals, and if you look at the same point in Sandy, we had served 164 thousand,” Dalton said Friday. “So as far as what we’re seeing then and what we’re seeing now, it’s very, very similar.”

It’s important to remember, she said, that Hurricane Sandy struck many more states, stretching from New England as far south as the District of Columbia. “This is just one area of Louisiana,” she added. “So if you look at it that way…it’s a very devastating disaster.”

At the peak of the deluge, Louisiana was hit by 6.9 trillion gallons of rain between August 8 and August 14, or roughly 10.4 million Olympic-size swimming pools‘ worth of water. The flooding is receding now, particularly in the northern reaches of the state, though some areas in the south will take longer to dry out, says Gavin Phillips, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “It’s going down everywhere now,” he says. “There’s nothing worsening at this point.”

The Red Cross estimates the relief effort in Louisiana could cost at least $30 million, though that number may grow as relief workers learn more about the scope of the disaster. As of Monday, the humanitarian organization had received about $7.8 million in donations and pledges.

While Hurricane Sandy and the recent Louisiana flooding were devastating, they pale in comparison to Louisiana’s other famous disaster, Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast 10 years ago, killing at least 1,833 people.

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Is the Louisiana Flooding More Devastating Than Hurricane Sandy?

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Swift Boat 2.0 Is Now Underway. Where’s the Press?

by GeriSimos937 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the loathsome Swift boating of John Kerry in 2004 worked a treat. So this year Trump supporters are engaging in Swift boat 2.0: a surprisingly overt campaign claiming that Hillary Clinton is seriously ill but covering it up. Sean Hannity has been the ringleader, talking it up almost nightly on his show. Rudy Giuliani joined the fun this weekend, and Katrina Pierson, the Baghdad Bob of spokespeople, suggested that Hillary has “dysphasia.” Even the candidate himself has gotten into the act:

Trump has followed this up with references to Hillary not having the “mental and physical stamina” to be president—wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

This is all literally built on nothing. There’s a video of Hillary slipping on an icy step outside a church a few months ago. There’s a video of her making a funny face while talking to some supporters. That’s it. Unlike Trump himself, Hillary has released a detailed statement from her doctor, and there’s nothing wrong with her.

I know how tiresome it is to wonder how the press would treat something like this if it came from the other side, but, um, how would the press treat this if it were coming from the Hillary Clinton campaign? My guess: it would be like World War III. They would be demanding proof, writing endlessly about how this “once again” raised trust issues, and just generally raising front-page hell over it. Which would be perfectly fair! But when Trump does it, it’s just another boys-will-be-boys moment. Yawn.

Trump has done so many disgusting things that I know it’s hard to keep track sometimes. But this ranks right up there, and he deserves brutal coverage over it. He’s not really getting it, though. All the usual liberal suspects are on this, but the mainstream press has treated it like yet another occasional A14 blurb. Where’s the outrage, folks?

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Swift Boat 2.0 Is Now Underway. Where’s the Press?

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Welfare Reform Is 20 Years Old and It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

by ANSJclbotxccm Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last year, Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi made a decision that could disrupt the lives of nearly 84,000 of his state’s poorest residents. There was no public announcement or debate. It took a critical report by advocates and a swell in media coverage to alert policy circles to what was coming. “The overall feeling was a lot of panic and stress,” said Jessica Shappley, a senior policy analyst at the Jackson-based Hope Policy Institute.

The two-term Republican governor had reintroduced a three-month time limit on food stamp access for “able-bodied adults without dependents,” individuals between the ages of 18 and 49 who are known as “ABAWDs.” After three months of receiving food aid, they would now have to prove they were working at least 20 hours a week. If they couldn’t, their food stamps—averaging between $150 and $170 a month—would be cut off. The loss of that aid would disrupt the lives of many low-income Mississippians. “It’s the difference between having a meal every day until the end of the month and literally running on empty the last couple weeks,” said Matt Williams, research director at the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative.

The time limit is an often overlooked section of the sweeping welfare reform bill that former President Bill Clinton signed into law 20 years ago today. In a statement after signing the bill, Clinton heralded the legislation as a “historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.” The bill granted states a large degree of discretion over how, and even whether, the food stamp policy was implemented, so that states with high unemployment were able to request a waiver that nullifies the time limit.

In recent years, Republican governors and legislatures across the country have passed up the waivers not because of belt-tightening—SNAP benefits are fully funded by the federal government, and the administrative costs are split 50-50 with the state—but because of ideology. Mississippi, which has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, had received a statewide waiver every year since 2006. But in 2016, the story took an unexpected turn. Echoing like-minded politicians in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Gov. Bryant told the Mississippi Department of Human Services that he wanted to “steer people to jobs,” the Associated Press reported. The consequence? Across the country, tens of thousands of people in areas of high unemployment—including veterans, the homeless, and the mentally and physically handicapped—have lost access to federally funded food assistance. Many are likely to fall into what policymakers call “food insecurity,” the state of not reliably knowing where your next meal will come from.

The tension between conservative ideology and the harsh realities of poverty is nowhere more evident than Mississippi, which has the highest rate of food insecurity in the nation (22 percent) and the second-highest rate of poverty. African Americans are more than twice as likely to be poor than white Mississippians. Three historically impoverished regions converge here: the toe of Appalachia in the northeastern corner, the Delta region along the western edge, and the Black Belt that extends across the state. Since agricultural labor was mechanized, beginning in the 1940s, and jobs in rural regions disappeared, working-age people have moved, leaving a shrunken tax base. “We have some counties that are persistently losing people,” said John Green, director of the Center for Population Studies at the University of Mississippi. “As the counties try to do things like improve education, diversify the economy, invest in small businesses, it’s harder and harder for them to do that.”

With unemployment rates in some counties more than twice as high as in the United States as a whole, few jobs exist for the people who now must work 20 hours a week to avoid losing their food stamps. Earlier this year, Bryant’s spokesman directed the Associated Press to the state’s jobs app, which he said “currently lists more than 40,000 job openings,” but there were twice as many ABAWDs as positions and no guarantees that the jobs were in communities where they lived.

The federal government even offers additional funding to states that pledge to provide job training or workfare slots for every person facing the time limit. But only five states have taken the pledge, and Mississippi is not among them. A memo sent by the Mississippi Department of Human Services to the US Department of Agriculture last year estimated that more than 71,000 of an estimated 84,000 ABAWDs were at risk of losing their food stamps and noted that only 1,391 workfare slots would be made available each month in 2016. The problem, according to Ed Bolen, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is that job training and workfare programs are “expensive,” and under the 1996 welfare reform bill, states are not obligated to offer them.

The time limit became law during a period of seismic shifts in the American welfare system. In July 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Republican-dominated Congress were desperately seeking a compromise on the radical welfare overhaul that Clinton had promised in his presidential run. Clinton had already vetoed two proposals. On the day the House was to vote on a third version, John Kasich and Bob Ney from Ohio proposed a three-month lifetime limit on food stamps for able-bodied adults without dependents—unless they worked 20 hours a week.

Some Democrats were horrified; Bill Hefner (D-N.C.) declared it the “most mean-spirited amendment” that had come before the body in his 22 years in the House. Kasich assured the critics that anyone willing to work would be able to meet the requirement. “If you cannot find a job, you go to work for the state in a workfare program,” he said, adding that the rule would only apply in areas where “there are jobs available.” The amendment was debated for half an hour and added to the welfare reform bill. In negotiations, the time limit was softened to three months every three years. Despite signing the bill, Clinton expressed “strong objections” to the food stamp provision, saying that the policy failed to support able-bodied adults who “want to work, but cannot find a job or are not given the opportunity to participate in a work program.” Summing up the bill’s popular appeal, Ney—who a decade later was jailed for selling official favors to the clients of notorious Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff—told the Columbus Dispatch that there was “no escalator built by Washington to carry you up the ladder of opportunity.”

Suspicion toward the able-bodied poor runs deep in the history of US social assistance. In the words of historian Michael Katz, “Except for the Great Depression of the 1930s, even abundant evidence of job scarcity failed to shake the belief that men were unemployed because they were lazy or incompetent.” During the Reagan era, black mothers described as “welfare queens” became seen as undeserving of aid. By 1996, food stamps were the only form of aid widely available to the able-bodied poor. A few, about 136,000, also received general assistance, or cash benefits granted to the impoverished who do not qualify for other programs. But that support has waned as states slashed their general assistance programs in the intervening decades. Today, only 11 states offer such benefits to childless adults who are not disabled, leaving food stamps the one source of aid for the more than 1 million people in this group.

For all the political rancor directed at the able-bodied poor, remarkably little is known about them. A report commissioned by the USDA in 1998 referred to ABAWDs as a “little-known segment of the Food Stamp population,” and little has changed since then. States are not obligated to track the able-bodied once they leave SNAP; from a policy standpoint, that means they all but disappear. The group likely to be cut off from food stamps have an average monthly income of just 17 percent of the official poverty line, which in 2016 is $11,880 a year for an individual, and includes veterans, the homeless, and people with undiagnosed mental and physical disabilities.

Consider the 48-year-old African American woman in poor physical health who earlier this summer appeared at an office in Indianola, Mississippi, a city in the heart of the Delta known as the childhood home of B.B. King. She wanted a signature to prove that she had come looking for work and arrived at the Mississippi Center for Justice—a Jackson-based public-interest law firm. The staff soon realized that she was one of those nearly 84,000 in the state struck by the new time limit. She told Matt Williams, then a policy associate at the center, that after a lifetime of work her back could no longer handle physical labor. Under federal law, a physical handicap should have qualified her for an exemption from the time limit. But she had been led to understand that, because she was not receiving disability payments, she was legally “able-bodied.” After missing an employment and training session early in the year, the woman lost her food stamps for two months. Desperate, she had re-enrolled and was now paying someone to drive her around the city to perform mandatory job search activities, Williams told Mother Jones. He and a colleague advised the woman to seek a medical notice testifying to her condition, after which they lost contact.

There are provisions in the law to protect people in certain circumstances from the time limit, but to determine whether a person qualifies for an exemption the state has to gather a pile of new information. Many states don’t. Instead they send out form letters informing ABAWDs that they are now facing the time limit and telling them to speak to a caseworker if they qualify for an exemption. By doing that, states have shifted the burden of implementing a vital piece of the policy onto the poor and disadvantaged people affected by it. In Florida, according to Cindy Huddleston, an attorney at Florida Legal Services, people are “never given a complete list of everything that might exempt them.” When the time limit went into effect in Franklin County, Ohio, in 2014, people thought to be ABAWDs “were brought in in very large groups, anywhere from 200 to 400 people…and basically told to go get a job,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. “Having been in those,” she added, “I can tell you they’re worse than cattle calls. It’s hard to hear instructions.”

There are a whole host of reasons why a person might not be able to find or perform work, but little of this information is systematically captured by state agencies. From 2014 to 2015, Hamler-Fugitt’s organization conducted a rare comprehensive survey of 5,000 people subjected to the time limit in Franklin County. What they found contradicts the popular image of the food stamp recipient who could work but just doesn’t feel like it. One in three of their “able-bodied” clients self-reported a physical or mental limitation, with a quarter saying their conditions obstructed daily activities. Nearly 13 percent said they were caregivers to a parent, friend, or relative. And 36 percent said they had felony convictions, a known barrier to employment. Public support for the policy might just hinge on the public not truly knowing who is affected, Cindy Huddleston said. “If people realized that these are veterans, people with mental disabilities, people who have nowhere else to turn…they might feel differently.”

In Mississippi, many of those now facing the time limit likely qualify for an exemption. Ellen Collins runs the Prosperity Center of Greater Jackson, a one-stop shop serving low-income Mississippians in partnership with a Department of Human Services office. When five suspected ABAWDs came in for a meeting with a caseworker earlier this year, she said, it turned out that three of them qualified for an exemption. “What I’m hearing from other offices is that they think that same percentage probably applied,” Collins said. But without individual attention from caseworkers, thousands have likely slipped through the cracks. The Mississippi Center for Justice estimates that more than 42,000 ABAWDs disappeared from the SNAP program between January and June this year.

While advocates suggest that Mississippi could invest more in job training or use the many measures available in the bill to soften the time limit’s impact, there is a much simpler solution: Mississippi could seek a waiver. But, as Williams from the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative notes, “Pure politics and ideology has driven the decision not to seek that waiver.”

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Welfare Reform Is 20 Years Old and It’s Worse Than You Can Imagine

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This Florida Community May Unleash Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Fight Zika and Dengue

by EzequielQXI Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Genetically engineered mosquitoes may sound like a sci-fi superbug out of a Stephen Spielberg film, but these are the real deal. The altered insects are the latest approach to quell the spread of mosquito-borne diseases that claim an estimated 725,000 lives globally each year, not to mention Zika virus, which has spread rapidly in the Americas and causes alarming birth defects—and could turn out to affect the adult brain, too—but seldom kills.

Earlier this month, the FDA approved the first proposed US field trial of genetically modified mosquitoes. The trial is planned to launch in Key Haven, Florida, 161 miles south of the Miami-Dade neighborhood where the nation’s first locally transmitted Zika cases have been detected—and five miles from the the heart of Florida’s 2009-2010 outbreak of dengue, a potentially deadly virus that can be spread by the same mosquito. Local opposition has stalled the release of the altered bugs, even as the Zika virus continues to spread in South Florida. Now residents in this island community will get to weigh in on the fate of the trial via a nonbinding local referendum this November. A majority of the mosquito control commissioners for the Keys, who have final say in the matter, have vowed to side with the locals. If a trial is approved, the mosquitoes could be let loose as early as December.

Whether it happens this time or not, the interest in fighting mosquitoes with high-tech methods is only growing. In science labs across the globe, researchers are studying parasitic microbes, various types of genetic modifications, and even new techniques that, in theory, could nearly eradicate local mosquito populations or make it impossible for the mosquitoes to transmit a given disease. In the meantime, here’s what you should know about the proposed release in South Florida.

How are these mosquitoes modified?
Scientists at Oxitec, a UK-based company that has spent years honing its techniques in the lab and in the field, have altered Aedes aegypti—the primary mosquito conduit for Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya—with a gene that causes its progeny to die in the larval stage. The researchers sort the altered mosquitoes by sex and release only the males, which then go out and mate with wild females, dooming their offspring. The modified mosquitoes, which can only survive a few days outside the climate-controlled comforts of a laboratory, also carry a gene for a fluorescent protein that lets researchers distinguish modified mosquitoes from wild ones. Both of the inserted genes are non-toxic and non-allergenic.

What if one of these mosquitoes were to bite me?
Assuming just males are released, they won’t—only females bite, because they need your blood to nourish their eggs. A few females get past the screening, but they comprise less than 0.2 percent of the insects released, and the chance of getting bit by one of these rare females is lower still. In the unlikely event that you are bitten by a modified mosquito, the result will be no different than with an ordinary one, according to Matthew DeGennero, a mosquito neurogeneticist at Florida International University. Mosquitoes have been around for 210 million years, he points out, yet we have no evidence that they’ve ever been able to transfer their DNA to any other organisms, including the ones they feed on.

But can’t releasing one organism to control another one mess with the natural balance?
Sure. Humans have made plenty of such blunders trying to control pests. Hawaii’s mongoose infestation, Australia’s poisonous cane toads, and Canada’s thistle-eating weevils are just a few examples of “biocontrol” gone awry. The difference with the Oxitec mosquitoes is that, unlike the introduced species of the past, they are engineered to disappear quickly. It’s actually a great business model, because the mosquito control boards will have to keep purchasing from Oxitec to keep local mosquito populations suppressed. But it also makes it easier to deal with unintended consequences—which the FDA deems unlikely in any case.

One valid concern is that reducing the numbers of Aedes aegypti may allow its cousin Aedes albopictus—which is capable of transmitting the same viruses—to move in. But in addition to being a less-efficient disease carrier, albopictus can have somewhat different habits and meal preferences. Aegypti feed almost exclusively on human blood, and tend to live alongside people in densely populated areas. Albopictus is just as prone to feeding on wildlife and livestock, and tends to stay in more rural settings, where they are less likely to spread disease. But they also show up in places like Los Angeles. In short, it’s complicated.

How will the GM mosquitoes affect other animals that feed on mosquitoes?
Most insect eaters have broad diets, so there’s no evidence that eliminating a specific mosquito will leave anyone without food. Nor will snacking on GM mosquitoes harm the birds, bats, and other fauna that eat the bloodsuckers. On the contrary, DeGennaro says, releasing modified mosquitos is a lot less harmful to the environment than spraying nasty chemicals. Each year 15 million acres across the US are doused in Naled, a neurotoxic insecticide used to keep mosquito populations in check. “Insecticides are very problematic for the environment,” DeGennaro says. “They disturb the ecosystem and affect insects other than the one you’re targeting.” Banned in Europe, Naled is known to kill bees, butterflies, birds, and fish indiscriminately. For this reason, Puerto Rico refused to accept Naled shipments from the US government to combat its Zika epidemic, even though a 20-25 percent infection rate is expected there by summer’s end. The United States, however, deploys tens of thousands of gallons of Naled annually to control Aedes aegypti. The FDA has concluded that the risk GM mosquitos pose for humans and other species is extremely low: “I can’t think of a potential problem with this,” DeGennaro says. “But I can think of a million potential problems with insecticides.”

What if I don’t want to be a guinea pig?
You won’t be, really. Oxitec has already released modified mosquitoes in several countries, including Malaysia, Brazil, and Panama—and more than three million altered skeeters lived out their short lives in the Cayman Islands in 2009 during the company’s first field trial. The proposed trial in the Keys isn’t intended to test the mosquitoes’ safety or environmental impacts—Oxitec has spent 14 years on such studies already. Rather, the purpose is to determine whether the altered mosquitoes can reduce Aedes aegypti populations in this environment the way they’ve done so elsewhere. Oxitec reports that wild aegypti populations have been slashed by more than 90 percent in areas where its mosquitoes were released. Given that aegypti puts more than 40 percent of the world’s population at risk for various diseases, those figures could prove convincing to many health and safety officials—at least until an effective vaccines becomes available.

Genetic tinkering is hardly new, of course. “Humans have been genetically modifying organisms since the dawn of civilization,” DeGennero says. “That’s why we have crops and domestic animals.” For nearly three decades, diabetics have been injecting themselves with insulin produced by genetically modified bacteria. In 2015, 444 million acres of genetically modified seed was planted across the globe, and genetically engineered salmon may be on the menu as early as next year. “This technology has potential to save people’s lives,” DeGennero says. “I would happily have these mosquitos where I live.”

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This Florida Community May Unleash Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Fight Zika and Dengue

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They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us

by petemcvey8 Posted on August 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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So I’m reading a Jay Nordlinger piece over at The Corner, and he’s pretty unhappy with both Donald Trump and his new campaign guru, Steve Bannon. I’m nodding along as Nordlinger refers to some of the crude hatred that Bannon spews, when I come to this:

It occurred to me that the two phrases already mentioned — “turn on the hate” and “burn this bitch down” — are perfect mottos for the new GOP: the Trump GOP.

I thought of what Roger Scruton said to Mona Charen and me, in a podcast last year:

“I think that, in the end, there is something that unites all conservatives, which is that they are pursuing something they love. My view is that the Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on. And what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we’re up against people who want to destroy them, and it’s very simple.”

Seriously? You think lefties are motivated by hatred of our country, hatred of our institutions, hatred of the law, hatred of the family, “and so on”? I know that liberals and conservatives don’t see eye to eye on this stuff, but you’ve at least talked to a few liberals now and then, haven’t you? The ones I know don’t feel anything close to this way. It’s true that there are some aspects of country/institutions/law/family that we’d like to change, but then again, that’s true of conservatives too. Right?

Anyway, if this is truly what you believe, then it’s a little hard for me to see much daylight between you and Trump. What’s your real beef with him, Jay?

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They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us

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Planned Parenthood Wins in a Florida Court

by ThomasMcPeak225 Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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A federal judge permanently blocked parts of Florida omnibus legislation that aimed to cut off state funding for preventative health services at women’s clinics that also provide abortions, a measure that was perceived to have targeted Planned Parenthood clinics. Another provision in the law that would have vastly increased what providers have described as unnecessary records inspection requirements for abortion clinics was permanently blocked as well.

The ruling comes at a critical time for Florida—Zika is now spreading in Miami Beach and north of Miami, Gov. Rick Scott confirmed Friday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued a new travel warning that advises pregnant women to avoid the area. So far, there have been 36 confirmed cases.

“We are grateful the court stepped in to stop Rick Scott in his tracks and protect access to health care,” said Lillian Tamayo, CEO of Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida. “If this law had gone into effect, it would have made a bad situation even worse. With the threat of Zika growing by the day, this care is even more critical. It’s time to stop political attacks on women’s basic health care.”

The legislation passed the conservative Legislature with ease back in March, and Scott signed it into law shortly thereafter. The law specifically took aim at Planned Parenthood’s funding in the wake of a smear campaign by anti-abortion activist David Daleiden that alleged Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue for profit. (None of the investigations into Daleiden’s allegations have found the health care provider guilty of any wrongdoing.) In June, US District Judge Robert Hinkle temporarily put provisions in the law on hold after Florida Planned Parenthood affiliates challenged them as unconstitutional.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that a government cannot prohibit indirectly—by withholding otherwise-available public funds—conduct that the government could not constitutionally prohibit directly,” Hinkle wrote in June when he placed the law on hold.

State and federal law already prohibit the use of federal funds to finance abortion procedures. The Florida law would have cut $500,000 in expected state funding that Planned Parenthood uses to fund health care screenings and a school dropout prevention program. Opponents of the law also criticized its requirements for records inspections at abortion clinics, fearing it would jeopardize patient privacy by making it easy to uncover details about mental health history, abortion care history, and HIV status.

As previously reported in Mother Jones, Scott had promised to allocate $26 million in state funds to deal with the health crisis, part of which would pay for CDC Zika prevention kits that include two kinds of mosquito repellent, tablets that kill mosquitos in water, and condoms. He has also said his office and Florida’s Department of Health were coordinating to go door to door in an effort to educate women in areas of concern about the risks Zika poses. It’s unclear whether any of those plans have been enacted.

The state could still appeal the decision, but because Scott ultimately decided to drop further legal action in this case, allowing for the injunction, it seems unlikely. Scott’s spokeswoman told ABC News that the governor is reviewing the order, and maintained that “Scott is a pro-life governor who believes in the sanctity of life.”

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Planned Parenthood Wins in a Florida Court

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