Tag Archives: women

Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

by MilfordMnh Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

When an incarcerated pregnant woman in Illinois slept too long through mealtime, a guard decided to punish her by placing her in solitary confinement. While in isolation, the woman—who had a long history of depression—was denied access to her prenatal vitamins and was not given water for hours. She soon became highly anxious. This is one of the disturbing ways that US prisons treat incarcerated women who are pregnant, transgender, mentally ill, or who report that they are raped, according to a new report published Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Many of the reasons women are placed in isolation are highly subjective, the reports notes: “Because many cases come down to the word of a prisoner against the word of a corrections officer, a guard’s bad day can easily turn into a solitary confinement sentence for a prisoner for retaliatory reasons, such as a prisoner’s filing a grievance.”

Solitary confinement, where prisoners are isolated for 22-24 hours a day with greatly reduced human contact and access to sunlight, is common practice in US prisons, but its harmful effects are well-documented. A United Nations torture expert said in 2011 that solitary should never be used on people with mental disabilities, and should never last longer than 15 days. In February, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for US prisons to stop using solitary confinement on vulnerable populations, including pregnant women. And recently, the Justice Department sued Ohio for placing mentally ill boys in solitary confinement for excessive amounts of time.

According to the ACLU report, guards sometimes use solitary confinement to retaliate against women who report rape by corrections officers. As we reported in 2010, Michelle Ortiz, who was serving one year at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, alleged that she was sexually assaulted multiple times by a guard. When she spoke out, she was allegedly placed in solitary confinement. In another case, a prisoner named Lisa Jaramillo served more than 100 days in solitary confinement for allegedly lying about incidents of sexual assault.

“Women who have been sexually abused by prison guards are…forced to decide between reporting the attack and risking retaliation, or not reporting it and risking further assault,” the report reads. The authors note that the lack of privacy in solitary cells can further victimize women. In solitary, a woman’s attacker can closely watch her sleep, use the toilet, or undress.

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Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

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In War, Truth Is the First Casualty

by DenisSuggs Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Herszenhorn reports that Tuesday marked yet another day of “bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies” that have marked the Russian response to the crisis in Ukraine:

It is an extraordinary propaganda campaign that political analysts say reflects a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials. And in recent days, it has largely succeeded — at least for Russia’s domestic audience — in painting a picture of chaos and danger in eastern Ukraine, although it was pro-Russian forces themselves who created it by seizing public buildings and setting up roadblocks.

….To watch the television news in Russia is to be pulled into a swirling, 24-hour vortex of alarmist proclamations of Western aggression, sinister claims of rising fascism and breathless accounts of imminent hostilities by the “illegal” Ukrainian government in Kiev, which has proved itself in recent days to be largely powerless.

The Rossiya 24 news channel, for instance, has been broadcasting virtually nonstop with a small graphic at the bottom corner of the screen that says “Ukrainian Crisis” above the image of a masked fighter, set against the backdrop of the red-and-black flag of the nationalist, World War II-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on Soviet forces.

Over the course of several hours of coverage on Tuesday, Rossiya 24 reported that four to 11 peaceful, pro-Russian “supporters of federalization” in Ukraine were killed near the town of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine when a mixed force of right-wing Ukrainians and foreign mercenaries strafed an airfield with automatic gunfire from helicopter gunships before landing and seizing control.

In fact, on the ground, a small crowd of residents surrounded a Ukrainian commander who had landed at the airfield in a helicopter, and while there were reports of stones thrown and shots fired in the air, only a few minor injuries were reported with no signs of fatalities.

Thank God we live in America, where this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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In War, Truth Is the First Casualty

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Medical Inflation Is Up, But It’s Probably Just a Blip

by WilliamThrelkel Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff reports that health care spending ticked upward at the end of 2013:

A four-year slowdown in health spending growth could be coming to an end….Federal data suggests that health care spending is now growing just as quickly as it was prior to the recession.

….The Altarum Institute in Ann Arbor, Mich. tracks health spending growth by month. It saw an uptick in late 2013 that has continued into preliminary numbers for 2014. Separate data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which tracks the growth or consumer spending by quarter, shows something similar: health spending grew by 5.6 percent in the last quarter of 2013, the fastest growth recorded since 2004.

Inflation in the final quarter of 2013 ran a little over 1 percent, which means health care spending rose 4.5 percent faster than the overall inflation rate. That’s a lot. But it’s also only one quarter, and it’s hardly unexpected. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows how much per capita health care spending has increased over and above the inflation rate for the past 40 years. There are two key takeaways:

Medical inflation has been on a striking long-term downward path since the early 80s.
There’s a ton of noise in the data, with every decline followed by a subsequent upward correction.

The HMO revolution of the 90s sent medical inflation plummeting. Then a correction. Then another big drop. And another upward correction. Then another drop. If that’s followed by an upward correction for a few years, it would hardly be a surprise.

Nonetheless, the long-term trend is pretty clear, and it shows up no matter how you slice the data. For many years, medical inflation was running as much as 4-6 percent higher than overall inflation. Today that number is 1-2 percent, and the variability seems to be getting smaller. What’s more, that 1-2 percent number matches the long-term trend during the entire postwar period (see chart below). There’s good reason to think that it might be the natural rate of medical inflation, with the 80s and early 90s as an outlier. That’s where I’d put my money, anyway.

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Medical Inflation Is Up, But It’s Probably Just a Blip

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Donald Rumsfeld Will Never Overpay His Taxes

by AileenFlanagan Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Steve Benen, I see that Donald Rumsfeld sends the IRS a letter every year when he files his taxes. Here it is:

I have sent in our federal income tax and our gift tax returns for 2013. As in prior years, it is important for you to know that I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate. I say that despite the fact that I am a college graduate and I try hard to make sure our tax returns are accurate.

The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated, that I know I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, as I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate. As in past years, I have spent more money that I wanted to….

Etc. Two things here:

As a longtime feeder at the public trough, Rumsfeld is surely aware that the IRS isn’t responsible for the complexity of the tax code. Congress is. He needs to write an annual letter to his representative in Congress instead. As a resident of Washington DC, of course, he doesn’t really have one, but that’s a whole different story. However, I’m sure Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton would be delighted to receive his letter anyway.
The big reason taxes are complicated is because people do complicated things with their money—often with the express aim of lowering their taxes. Nobody is forced to do this. If you want, you can just add up all your income and pay the statutory rate without worrying about deductions and loopholes and capital gains rates and so forth. That will make your taxes easy. But if you’re the kind of person who has enough money to hire expensive accountants to manage your carefully tailored investments, then you have enough money to pay those accountants to do your taxes too.

In any case, none of this really matters. No matter how much Rumsfeld pays in taxes, it will never be enough to make up for the damage he’s done to this country over his lifetime. He should stop whining. He owes us.

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Donald Rumsfeld Will Never Overpay His Taxes

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Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

by w0ujpysd Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Like a lot of people, Ed Kilgore is distressed at the outpouring of support on the right for Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy:

Call it “individualism” or “libertarianism” or whatever you want, but those who declare themselves a Republic of One and raise their own flags are in a very literal sense being unpatriotic.

That’s why I’m alarmed by the support in many conservative precincts for the Nevada scofflaws who have been exploiting public lands for private purposes and refuse to pay for the privilege because they choose not to “recognize” the authority of the United States. Totally aside from the double standards involved in expecting kid-glove treatment of one set of lawbreakers as opposed to poorer and perhaps darker criminal suspects, fans of the Bundys are encouraging those who claim a right to wage armed revolutionary war towards their obligations as Americans. It makes me really crazy when such people are described as “superpatriots.” Nothing could be more contrary to the truth.

The details of the Bundy case have gotten a lot of attention at conservative sites, but the details really don’t matter. Bundy has a baroque claim that the United States has no legal right to grazing land in Nevada; for over a decade, every court has summarily disagreed. It’s federal land whether Bundy likes it or not, and Bundy has refused for years to pay standard grazing fees—so a couple of weeks ago the feds finally decided to enforce the latest court order allowing them to confiscate Bundy’s cattle if he didn’t leave. The rest is just fluff, a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorizing that led to last week’s armed standoff between federal agents and the vigilante army created by movement conservatives.

The fact that so many on the right are valorizing Bundy—or, at minimum, tiptoeing around his obvious nutbaggery—is a testament to the enduring power of Waco and Ruby Ridge among conservatives. The rest of us may barely remember them, but they’re totemic events on the right, fueling Glenn-Beckian fantasies of black helicopters and jackbooted federal thugs for more than two decades now. Mainstream conservatives have pandered to this stuff for years because it was convenient, and that’s brought them to where they are today: too scared to stand up to the vigilantes they created and speak the simple truth. They complain endlessly about President Obama’s “lawlessness,” but this is lawlessness. It’s appalling that so many of them aren’t merely afraid to plainly say so, but actively seem to be egging it on.

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Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

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Rutgers Athletic Director Wishes Critical Local Newspaper Would Die

by AdriannaMoncrie Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rutgers University athletic director Julie Hermann told a journalism class that athletes at the school receive plenty of benefits and that it would be “great” if the Star-Ledger, the New Jersey newspaper that just laid off 167 staffers, would die completely, according to a report by Muckgers last week.

When a student in the class said the Star-Ledger might go under, Hermann responded, “That’d be great. I’m going to do all I can to not to give them a headline to keep them alive because I think I got them through the summer.” The paper dedicated a great deal of coverage to Hermann after she replaced former AD Tim Pernetti, who resigned last year when it was revealed he allowed men’s basketball coach Mike Rice to keep his job after being presented video evidence of Rice pelting his players with basketballs and shouting insults and gay slurs at them during practice. Hermann came with her own baggage—the women’s volleyball team she coached at the University of Tennessee 17 years ago wrote a letter to the athletic department accusing her of “mental cruelty,” including referring to athletes as “whores, alcoholics, and learning disabled.”

Hermann has denied treating her players that way, and in a statement from Rutgers to the Star-Ledger, said she was just speaking to the class “in an informal way and out of the glare of the media spotlight” and “had no knowledge of the impending reorganization of the Star-Ledger.” (Hermann’s talk, which came before the most recent layoffs were announced, was recorded by a student in attendance.)

The classroom conversation also touched on the college athlete unionization movement. “What of those 1,000 institutions that sponsor college sports—who can sustain the kids unionizing?” Hermann asked the class. “Who can do that? Most of them are barely making it as it is.” Hermann, it should be noted, has a base salary of $450,000. She went on to extol the benefits Rutgers athletes are already getting (especially now that that no one is throwing basketballs at them during practice, one assumes):

By the time we go recruit a football player, sign him, bring him to campus, do all of their care, provide all of their medicine, all of their travel, all of their gear, all the things we’ve got to provide—by the time we’re done with him, here at Rutgers, we’ve spent over half a million dollars on him minimum…so, technically, what we’re providing for them is a value, it’s about $100,000. How many of you are going to walk out of here and get jobs that pay you $100,000?

What’s amazing is that Hermann’s description of what Rutgers provides athletes is the exact legal argument that allowed Northwestern University football players the right to unionize. (Not to mention that one of players’ largest grievances is that universities don’t “do all of their care,” since many health effects from playing football don’t crop up until later in life.) And while many recent Rutgers grads may not be pulling in $100,000 salaries, their employers will be paying them in real money—not scholarships, shoulder pads, and concussion treatments.

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Rutgers Athletic Director Wishes Critical Local Newspaper Would Die

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How About a Dolores Huerta Day?

by Ilariaujg Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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March 31 is Cesar Chavez’s birthday and a national holiday honoring his pioneering activism (which is the subject of a new feature film) around farm-workers rights. He is perhaps best known as a founder of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), now the United Farm Workers, a labor union. His cofounder Dolores Huerta, though still alive, is not nearly as well known. So who is she? Born in 1930 and raised in Stockton, California, Huerta, who is portrayed by Rosario Dawson in the Chavez film, has been arrested more than 20 times during peaceful protests, and is still out on the front lines taking part in civil rights actions. Here are five things you should know about her.

1. She’s the mother of the farm-workers movement.
After quitting her teaching job in 1955, Huerta helped register people to vote and became an organizer in the Community Service Organization, a Mexican-American association in California where Cesar Chavez was the statewide director. The pair eventually branched off, in 1962, to found the NFWA, and the rest is history.

2. She was instrumental in winning key protections for workers.
Only a year after launching the NFWA, Huerta secured disability insurance for California farm workers, and was central in the creation of the Aid for Dependent Families, a federal assistance program that stayed in effect until 1996.

3. She led a historic boycott against the grape industry.
In 1965, a group of Filipino workers went on strike for better working conditions, a cause that became known as the “Delano Grape Strike.” Huerta suggested to Chavez that the National Farm Workers Association boycott all California table grapes in support of Filipino workers. In 1970, the grape industry signed an agreement that increased wages and improved working conditions.

4. She originated the phrase, “Si se puede.”
Translated as “Yes we can,” this expression should be familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a labor protest in California. Although it is often misattributed to Chavez, Huerta told Makers that she came up with it. “It’s important for women to be able to take credit for the work that they do,” she said.

5. She helped put Latinas in power.
After a life-threatening assault by a police officer at a protest rally when she was 58, Huerta took a leave from the union to focus on the women’s movement. She campaigned across the country for two years as part of the Feminist Majority’s project to encourage Latinas to run for office. According to Huerta’s website, it had a significant affect on the number of women in government.

So, Happy Cesar Chavez Day, and don’t forget to give Huerta her due! Here’s a trailer for the film:

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How About a Dolores Huerta Day?

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Air pollution kills 7 million people every year

by MagdalenaSIVG Posted on March 25, 2014

Air pollution kills 7 million people every year

By

Nina Hale

Cairo air pollution.

The World Health Organization’s latest advice could be reinterpreted as a cruel oxymoron: Stop breathing, or you’ll stop breathing. A tall order, but one in eight deaths in 2012 was caused by air pollution. And more likely than not, that one air-pollution-wrecked body lived its shortened life in a poor or developing country — probably in Asia.

WHO’s latest air-pollution-linked mortality estimates double previous annual figures, due largely to medical discoveries about pollution’s poisonous effects. Scientists have been discovering that a shockingly long list of afflictions can be exacerbated or triggered by air pollution — everything from heart attacks and lung cancer to diabetes and viral infections. The inhalation of tiny particles is now regarded as the world’s largest single environmental health risk — responsible for an estimated 7 million deaths in 2012.

According to the WHO, indoor air pollution killed 4.3 million people in 2012. It’s produced by stoves and heaters that are fueled with coal, wood, dung, and crop residue. Some 3 billion people rely on cooking and heating facilities like these. Women and young children were more heavily affected than men by indoor air pollution. Half of the kids who died in 2012 before reaching their 5th birthday were thought to have been killed by pneumonia linked to indoor air pollution.

The WHO also attributed 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012 to outdoor air pollution, which is largely caused by power plants, trucks, cars, and crop-burning — with 88 percent of those deaths in low- and middle-income countries, mostly in Asia.

“The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes,” WHO official Maria Neira said. “Few risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollution; the evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe.”

If there’s a silver lining to this cloud of soot, it’s that the world’s homicidal air pollution problem is starting to capture the global attention it deserves. Globetrotting journalists have been filing breathless dispatches about China’s famously soupy smog. This report is sure to raise the profile of the issue as well. Slowly, it seems, the message is getting through: The clean air we take for granted in much of the West would be a luxury for the world’s poor.


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7 million deaths annually linked to air pollution, WHO

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

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Air pollution kills 7 million people every year

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Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

by EstelaPalfreyma Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Remember that CDC study showing a dramatic drop in obesity among 2-5 year olds that I wrote about last month? I was skeptical that it was real, and today Sharon Begley of Reuters follows up. Her conclusion? The whole thing is almost certainly bogus:

The latest study is based a well-respected data set taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES….The 2011-2012 version of the survey included 9,120 people; 871 of them were 2 to 5 years old….”In small samples like this, you are going to have chance fluctuations,” said epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

….A study of preschoolers in the federal WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program, which provides food vouchers, nutrition classes and counseling to low-income families, found virtually no change in obesity rates….”We agree there is a slight downward trend in obesity among 2-to-5-year olds,” said Shannon Whaley, a co-author of the WIC study. “But a 43 percent drop is absolutely not what we’re seeing.” The WIC study included more than 200,000 children

….Other studies also raise questions about the 40 percent claim. An earlier CDC study, reported in JAMA in December 2012, found that the prevalence of obesity among 2-to-4-year olds in low-income families fell to 14.9 percent in 2010 from 15.2 percent in 2003. That represents an improvement of less than 2 percent.

….For obesity rates to drop, researchers reckon, young children have to eat differently and become more active. But research shows little sign of such changes among 2-to-5-year olds, casting more doubt on the 43 percent claim….In 2010 Whaley and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of WIC classes and counseling to encourage healthy eating and activities for women and children in the program. Their findings were discouraging: Television watching and consumption of sweet or salty snacks actually rose, while fruit and vegetable consumption fell — changes that could lead to weight gain. One positive was a rise in physical activity.

To recap: the CDC study was small and had large error bars; other, larger studies find only slight drops in obesity; and there’s no indication of any behavioral changes that might have produced a dramatic weight loss. I’d add to that the fact that the CDC data showed no correlation between lower weight at ages 2-5 and lower weight a few years later at ages 6-11.

Bottom line: I hate to be such a buzzkill, but the CDC result seems highly likely to be nothing more than statistical noise. Childhood obesity has barely budged in the last decade.

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Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

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Charts: Hollywood’s White Dude Problem

by Palahnajje Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s 2014, yet women and people of color still are vastly underrepresented in the United States media landscape. A report published Wednesday by the Women’s Media Center found that, while some progress toward equality has been made, journalism and entertainment still lack a diversity of voices and a variety in representation. If the US media were a person, he’d be an old white guy.

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Charts: Hollywood’s White Dude Problem

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