Pacific Progressive

Faith in Values: Religious Liberty + Marriage Equality = Harmony, Not Dissension

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Sally Steenland

Sometimes the way an issue is framed matters as much as the facts. Take the so-called battle between marriage equality and religious liberty. Many activists against marriage equality claim that the two are inherently opposed to each other. According to their argument, if one side wins, the other loses.

The problem with this oppositional framing is that it isn’t true. In reality, marriage equality and religious liberty can support and strengthen each other. And this is true even when people are conflicted about same-sex marriage. Even then, they still believe that gay and lesbian couples should be treated fairly under the law.

Last week Third Way and the Human Rights Campaign released a national poll that validates these views. According to the poll, a majority of Americans support marriage equality and religious liberty, rather than believing that one threatens the other.

The poll also shows that a majority of Americans support nondiscrimination laws regarding gay and lesbian people and are opposed to any new laws that would deny them services. As for religious exemptions, a majority of Americans believe they should be limited to houses of worship and clergy.

Faith in Values: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Sally Steenland

Fifty years ago, four girls were killed and many more people were injured when abomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bomb went off at 10:22 in the morning on September 15, 1963, after Bible classes and before the 11:00 a.m. church service. The girls had gathered in the church basement ladies’ room, excited about the new school year and their participation in the morning service. It was the annual youth day, and they were dressed in white.

Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair were killed by a dynamite bomb planted by Robert Chambliss and other members of the Ku Klux Klan. They were ages 11 to 14.

The bombing shocked America and the world. Coming less than three weeks after the March on Washington, it was a sobering, ugly reminder that the battle for racial equality and justice was so abhorrent to so many white people that—beyond lynching, shooting, and beating black people and blowing up their homes—they felt compelled to bomb a church on a Sunday morning. The bombing was also a stark reminder of the high cost of justice and equality, measured in lost lives.

What Does FERC Do?

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Richard W. Caperton |

On September 17, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is scheduled to discuss the nomination of Ron Binz, a former Colorado state regulator, to be the new chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. As the committee considers his nomination, it must remember FERC’s critical role in protecting consumers and strengthening our nation’s energy system and not get sidetracked by issues that are outside of FERC’s purview.

It’s easy to see why some people may be unclear about exactly what FERC does. Many have long seen the commission as a sleepy backwater of the federal bureaucracy, where the most important rulings are known by numbers—Orders 888 and 2000 are particularly notable. It’s not that FERC’s work is unimportant, just that it is complicated and—let’s be honest—a little boring. In recent years, no one has paid it much attention.

Complex Personal Issues May Cloud Decisions About Buying Insurance

This material was published by Kaiser Health News.

By Michelle Andrews

If the volume of email from readers of this column is any indication, people are beginning to focus on how the health care overhaul will affect them.

With the opening of the online health insurance marketplaces less than a month away, consumers with job-based coverage want to know if they can buy a plan there (answer: yes, but they may not qualify for subsidies); those with individual coverage want to know how the plans will compare with what they currently have (answer: generally better coverage and potentially higher premiums, offset by subsidies); and those who have been unable to afford a plan or turned down because they have medical problems want to know if the marketplaces will provide better options than they currently have (answer: they should).

The Best Reporting on Hurricanes and Their Aftermaths

by Theodoric Meyer ProPublica

Mid-August marks the start of peak hurricane season, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned that this year's is likely to be worse than usual, with a forecast of 13 to 19 named storms. We've round up some of the best reporting on hurricanes and what happens after they're over 2014 from  inept planning to police abuses to waste and misspending during the recovery.

After the Flood, This American Life, September 2005

The week after Katrina struck New Orleans, This American Life devoted its show to giving "people who were in the storm more time than daily news shows could give, to tell their stories and talk about what happened."

One of those people was Denise Moore, who took shelter at the New Orleans Convention Center after the levees failed. "What they kept doing the whole time was tell us to line up for the buses that never came" she told Ira Glass. "It was like they were doing drills every four hours. You all have to line up for the bus. And if you bum rush the bus, they're just going to take off without you, and nobody is going to get to go anywhere. You have to line up. You have to be in a straight line. We're talking about old people in wheelchairs and women with babies in lines, waiting for buses that you know God damn well aren't coming, like they were playing with us."

The Deadly Choices at Memorial, ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, August 2009

Unfair Share: How Oil and Gas Drillers Avoid Paying Royalties

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica

Don Feusner ran dairy cattle on his 370-acre slice of northern Pennsylvania until he could no longer turn a profit by farming. Then, at age 60, he sold all but a few Angus and aimed for a comfortable retirement on money from drilling his land for natural gas instead.

It seemed promising. Two wells drilled on his lease hit as sweet a spot as the Marcellus shale could offer – tens of millions of cubic feet of natural gas gushed forth. Last December, he received a check for $8,506 for a month's share of the gas.

Then one day in April, Feusner ripped open his royalty envelope to find that while his wells were still producing the same amount of gas, the gusher of cash had slowed. His eyes cascaded down the page to his monthly balance at the bottom: $1,690.

Chesapeake Energy, the company that drilled his wells, was withholding almost 90 percent of Feusner's share of the income to cover unspecified "gathering" expenses and it wasn't explaining why.

"They said you're going to be a millionaire in a couple of years, but none of that has happened," Feusner said. "I guess we're expected to just take whatever they want to give us."

Like every landowner who signs a lease agreement to allow a drilling company to take resources off his land, Feusner is owed a cut of what is produced, called a royalty.

New York Promised Help for Mentally Ill Inmates – But Still Sticks Many in Solitary

by Christie Thompson ProPublica

This story was co-produced with WNYC.

When Amir Hall entered New York state prison for a parole violation in November 2009, he came with a long list of psychological problems. Hall arrived at the prison from a state psychiatric hospital, after he had tried to suffocate himself. Hospital staff diagnosed Hall with serious depression.

In Mid-State prison, Hall was in and out of solitary confinement for fighting with other inmates and other rule violations. After throwing Kool-Aid at an officer, he was sentenced to seven months in solitary at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York.

Hall did not want to be moved. When his mother and grandmother visited him that spring, Hall warned them: If he didn't get out of prison soon, he would not be coming home.

A grainy tape of Hall's transfer on June 18, 2010, shows prison guards spraying chemicals into his cell, forcing him to come out. He barely says a word as he is made to strip, shower, bend over and cough. His head drops, his shoulders slump. His face is blank and expressionless. He stares at his hands, except for a few furtive glances at the silent guards wearing gas masks and riot gear.

"There was somebody who looked defeated, like the life was beat out of him," said his sister Shaleah Hall. "I don't know who that person was. The person in that video was not my brother."

3 Charts Showing How Middle-Class Incomes Continue to Stagnate While Overall Inequality Grows

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By David Madland and Keith Miller

View the full charticle (CAP Action)

New Census Bureau data released this week further highlight the economic challenges faced by today’s middle class. As U.S. household incomes further declined in 2012, families in the middle class continued to watch their share of the national economic pie stagnate at record-low levels and see those at the very top disproportionately claim the little income growth that has occurred since the end of the Great Recession.

The following three charts present these latest Census figures in a historical context and illustrate the extent to which the middle class has struggled to make headway in an increasingly unequal economy.

While middle-class households suffered deeply during the Great Recession, the underlying trends that have left them increasingly excluded from the nation’s economic growth date back much further than 2007. The typical American household’s annual income peaked in 1999 and has since declined by 9 percent, while the share of the nation’s total income going to the middle class has been falling since topping out at 53.2 percent in 1968. What economic growth has occurred in recent years has been distributed more and more unequally, with the wealthiest households—and the super-rich in particular—claiming almost all of the income gains seen in the past three years as the middle class has fallen further behind.

View the full charticle (CAP Action)

 

 

Budget Gridlock Risks International Climate and Clean Energy Investments

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Rebecca Lefton and Jesse Vogel 

As Congress continues to operate without a budget and faces the prospect of a government shutdown on October 1, appropriations for crucial investments in international climate change mitigation and adaptation hang in the balance. While the Senate Appropriations Committee passed the fiscal year 2014 Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs appropriations bill, which maintains spending consistent with last year’s climate investments, the House Appropriations Committee voted to eliminate or significantly cut $10 billion for foreign-affairs programs. This vast difference means that international climate and clean energy investments—and their high rewards—are in danger.

Investments are crucial for climate, development, and international security

The effects of international climate change—which include more droughts, floods, and tropical storms—threaten to undo tremendous progress toward increased prosperity in the developing world. In areas of the world that already have complex and delicate geopolitical situations, climate change could displace populations and further destabilize governments. The formation of alliances and partnerships on environmental and climate initiatives with major emerging economies such as India, Indonesia, China, and Brazil that will help us meet other foreign policy objectives is at risk—and so too is international security.

ncome -- Not Assets -- Will Determine Subsidies In Online Insurance Marketplaces

By Michelle Andrews

This material was published by Kaiser Health News.

This week, I answer readers' questions about how income and other assets will affect health insurance choices and responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act, and whether having access to a student health plan will make a person ineligible for subsidized coverage on the exchanges.

Q. In 2012, I earned only $25,000, but I have $300,000 in stocks. I have individual health insurance. Will I be ineligible for a subsidy beginning in January because I am presently insured, or because I have large assets?

A. Neither of those facts would necessarily make you ineligible for subsidized coverage on the health insurance exchanges.

If the only coverage that's available to you is on the individual market, being covered by an existing individual plan wouldn't make you ineligible. But subsidies are available only for plans bought through the exchanges, not on the private market.

To be eligible for subsidized coverage, your income would have to be between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($11,490 to $45,960 for a single person in 2013).

More From This SeriesInsuring Your Health

What is Medicaid's Impact on Access to Care, Health Outcomes, and Quality of Care? Setting the Record Straight on the Evidence

This material was published by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Julia Paradise and Rachel Garfield

Introduction

Medicaid, the nation’s main public health insurance program for low-income people, now covers over 65 million Americans – more than 1 in every 5 – at least some time during the year. The program’s beneficiaries include many of the most disadvantaged individuals and families in the U.S. in terms of poverty, poor health, and disability. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) provided for a broad expansion of Medicaid to cover millions of low-income uninsured adults whom the program has historically excluded. However, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision on the ACA, the Medicaid expansion is, in effect, a state option. Almost half the states are moving forward with the Medicaid expansion. But the others, which are home to half the uninsured adults who could gain Medicaid coverage under the ACA, have decided not to expand Medicaid at this time or are still debating the issue.

Controversy about the Medicaid expansion has been stoked by an assertion that first appeared in a Wall Street Journaleditorial a couple of years ago and has since resurfaced periodically, that “Medicaid is worse than no coverage at all.”^{1 2 3 4 56} This claim about Medicaid is sharply at odds with the authoritative findings of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Consequences of Uninsurance, detailed in Care Without Coverage: Too Little, Too Late, the second of six reports the IOM issued on the subject in the early 2000’s.⁷ Based on a comprehensive review of the research examining the impact of health insurance on adults, the IOM charted the causal pathway from coverage to better health outcomes, concluding:

30 Years of Tackling Hunger on a Bipartisan Basis Is in Danger of Failing This Fall

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

by Erik Stegman and Nicole Williams

Every five years for the past three decades, members of Congress have been able to reach across the aisle and work together to tackle the pressing problem of hunger in our nation through the passage of the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act, or thefarm bill—specifically the nutrition assistance portion of the bill. As a result of this joint bipartisan effort, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP—originally the food stamp program—has enjoyed tremendous success over the years. It lifted4.7 million people out of poverty in 2011 alone, and has an estimated return of $1.70 for the economy for every dollar invested. As part of the farm bill, SNAP has been reauthorized relatively seamlessly seven times.

Oh, how times have changed. Paying little heed to the past 30 years of a bipartisan agreement and success in fighting hunger, House Republicans have now placed SNAP on the chopping block as they pursue their reckless, cuts-cuts-cuts approach to governing. Their latest proposal is to cut the program by $40 billion—double what they approved only months earlier. The new proposal will cut an estimated 4 million to 6 million people from nutrition assistance.

A Disaster in the Making Addressing the Vulnerability of Low-Income Communities to Extreme Weather

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Tracey Ross

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this report.  Download the report: PDF  Download introduction & summary: PDF  Read it in your browser: Scribd

On October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit the northeastern United States and became the deadliest and largest Atlantic hurricane of the year and the second costliest in U.S. history after Hurricane Katrina. Heeding the lessons that emerged from the blundered response to Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, the federal government was quick to react to Sandy with Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, officials arriving throughout the region and President Barack Obama surveying the damage from the ground.

Despite the quick response, however, many low-income residents of the region continued to face dire circumstances. Many low-income elderly and disabled residents of New York City’s public housing complexes were stranded in their apartments for weeks after the storm due to elevator outages. Other residents remained in the high rises, despite having no heat or power, because they had nowhere else to go or no means of getting out of their neighborhood. In other parts of the region, low-income people were unable to make it to food stamp centers for assistance. The estimated cost of the destruction wrought by Sandy was $65 billion, with low-income households greatly impacted.

Extreme weather is on the rise, and so-called “storms of the century” are part of the new normal. According to the National Climate Assessment draft, authored by 250 of the nation’s top scientists, academics, and business leaders:

Race and Beyond: Looking Back at the Leadership of Ben Jealous

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Sam Fulwood III 

Benjamin Todd Jealous’s decision to resign as president and CEO of the NAACP at the end of this year is a shocking development in the history of the civil rights organization.

Jealous, 40, announced this past weekend in a series of media interviews that effective December 31, he would no longer lead the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He said repeatedly that the decision to leave his post midway through an extended, three-year contract with two years remaining stemmed from a desire to spend more time with his family.

“Leadership knows when to step up and when to step down,” he told USA Today in an interview posted Sunday. “This day I can say with pride that I’m prepared to step down and make room for the next person who will lead this organization to its next chapter.”

Jealous made history in the 104-year-old organization when he was selected five years ago, at age 35, as its youngest leader. Now, he’s making it again by becoming the first in recent history to leave voluntarily with his head held high, and to leave the NAACP’s standing in a better and stronger place than when he arrived.

10 Truths that Should Be Said at This Week’s House Climate Change Hearing

This material was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Daniel J. Weiss

This Wednesday, September 18, the House Energy and Power Subcommittee will conduct a long-overdue hearing on climate change. It is unfortunately not to seek scientific facts from reputable institutions, such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, and similar experts, as requested 27 times by Ranking Committee and Subcommittee Members Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Bobby Rush (D-IL). Instead, the hearing is titled “The Obama Administration’s Climate Change Policies and Activities.”

The scheduled witnesses are Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy. During the hearing, they will probably be subjected to a barrage of phony claims by the 14 climate-science deniers who are serving on the subcommittee in an attempt to discredit President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan. These members undoubtedly will repeat the false and misleading claims made by the big polluting utilities, coal companies, oil companies, and other special interests that profit from the status quo of no limits on carbon pollution.

Instead of these stale attacks on settled climate science, hyperinflated estimates of the cost of cleanup, or denial of executive authority to act, here are 10 truths that should be said at the hearing.

No. 1: Climate science is settled