#justice for low income group

[aahanna]

"Haven't you noticed that we often bargain with poor people, like street vendors and auto drivers, but rarely negotiate prices with wealthy individuals or businesses that make significant profits every year? It's time to change this system and reconsider our approach to bargaining and fair pricing."

#desiblr #bargaining #market strategy #desi shit posting #desi tumblr #being desi #justice for low income group #desi tag #facts #indian tumblr #i am talking in general terms #i never did bargaining #desi girl #inequality #fair trade #desi studyblr #desi stuff #kindness

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #19

May 17-24 2024

President Biden wiped out the student loan debt of 160,000 more Americans. This debt cancellation of 7.7 billion dollars brings the total student loan debt relieved by the Biden Administration to $167 billion. The Administration has canceled student loan debt for 4.75 million Americans so far. The 160,000 borrowers forgiven this week owned an average of $35,000 each and are now debt free. The Administration announced plans last month to bring debt forgiveness to 30 million Americans with student loans coming this fall.

The Department of Justice announced it is suing Ticketmaster for being a monopoly. DoJ is suing Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation for monopolistic practices. Ticketmaster controls 70% of the live show ticket market leading to skyrocketing prices, hidden fees and last minute cancellation. The Justice Department is seeking to break up Live Nation and help bring competition back into the market. This is one of a number of monopoly law suits brought by the Biden administration against Apple in March and Amazon in September 2023.

The EPA announced $225 million in new funding to improve drinking and wastewater for tribal communities. The money will go to tribes in the mainland US as well as Alaska Native Villages. It'll help with testing for forever chemicals, and replacing of lead pipes as well as sustainability projects.

The EPA announced $300 million in grants to clean up former industrial sites. Known as "Brownfield" sites these former industrial sites are to be cleaned and redeveloped into community assets. The money will fund 200 projects across 178 communities. One such project will transform a former oil station in Philadelphia’s Kingsessing neighborhood, currently polluted with lead and other toxins into a waterfront bike trail.

The Department of Agriculture announced a historic expansion of its program to feed low income kids over the summer holidays. Since the 1960s the SUN Meals have served in person meals at schools and community centers during the summer holidays to low income children. This Year the Biden administration is rolling out SUN Bucks, a $120 per child grocery benefit. This benefit has been rejected by many Republican governors but in the states that will take part 21 million kids will benefit. Last year the Biden administration introduced SUN Meals To-Go, offering pick-up and delivery options expanding SUN's reach into rural communities. These expansions are part of the Biden administration's plan to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.

Vice-President Harris builds on her work in Africa to announce a plan to give 80% of Africa internet access by 2030, up from just 40% today. This push builds off efforts Harris has spearheaded since her trip to Africa in 2023, including $7 billion in climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation, and $1 billion to empower women. The public-private partnership between the African Development Bank Group and Mastercard plans to bring internet access to 3 million farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, before expanding to Uganda, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and then the rest of the continent, bring internet to 100 million people and businesses over the next 10 years. This is together with the work of Partnership for Digital Access in Africa which is hoping to bring internet access to 80% of Africans by 2030, up from 40% now, and just 30% of women on the continent. The Vice-President also announced $1 billion for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund to assure women in Africa have meaningful access to the internet and its economic opportunities.

The Senate approved Seth Aframe to be a Judge on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, it also approved Krissa Lanham, and Angela Martinez to district Judgeships in Arizona, as well as Dena Coggins to a district court seat in California. Bring the total number of judges appointed by President Biden to 201. Biden's Judges have been historically diverse. 64% of them are women and 62% of them are people of color. President Biden has appointed more black women to federal judgeships, more Hispanic judges and more Asian American judges and more LGBT judges than any other President, including Obama's full 8 years in office. President Biden has also focused on backgrounds appointing a record breaking number of former public defenders to judgeships, as well as labor and civil rights lawyers.

#Thanks Biden #Joe Biden #kamala harris #student loans #student loan forgiveness #ticketmaster #Africa #free lunch #hunger #poverty #internet #judges #politics #us politics #american politics

[dwellordream]

“…In the Early Middle Ages, most French Jewish communities had settled in the southeast, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Although there were few Jews north of the Alps, they were the focus of restrictive laws that limited their freedom of movement and their ability to interact with Christians.

For instance, a mid-fifth-century council held in Troyes, northern France, prohibited Jews from going out of their houses to have any form of communication with Christians during Eastertide – a time celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, therefore a particularly tense period for the Jewish community who were accused of his murder.

A century later, other councils banned the appointment of Jews to any public office that would put them in a position of superiority over a Christian. Jews were no longer allowed to work on Sundays and were to refrain from eating with Christians. Intermarriage between Jews and Christians was forbidden in early Roman law codes, a prohibition early medieval law codes reiterated.

At that time, the fragile state of Christianity – still a relatively new religion in Europe – fueled the clergy’s anxieties. Clergymen were afraid Jewish people would “pollute” the minds of Christians and turn them away from the Church. They advocated relentlessly for their conversion to Christianity. This project was finally successful in the seventh century when the Merovingian king Dagobert called for the baptism or expulsion of the Jews of his kingdom. More than a century of political unrest followed.

Dagobert’s rule, during which Jewish communities grew again in size. By the end of the year 800, Charlemagne became emperor. Charles’ attitude towards the Jews was ambivalent but more open than before. Carolingian capitularies reiterated certain older restrictions, and the chancery levied heavy taxes on the Jews. Because of these taxes, Jews constituted a reliable source of income for the chancery. Charlemagne, therefore, granted the Jewish communities privileges safeguarding their autonomy and their rights to practice their religion.

For instance, Jews responded to their own laws for all matters concerning “low justice,” such as marriage and business contracts, small offences, and inter-community disputes. Murders, however, were to be tried by the Christian authorities. Until the First Crusade, the lives of medieval French Jews were relatively peaceful – only two episodes of violence were reported in the early eleventh century. But things were about to change.

Set in the context of religious zeal, the Crusades stirred the pot of hate. Pope Urban II came to France in 1095 and preached the First Crusade with tremendous success. The message was clear: Christians should take up arms to fight the enemies of God and Christianity. While the pope clearly laid out that the point was to free Jerusalem, some interpreted it differently. According to chronicler Guibert of Nogent (1055–1124), a group of men from Rouen, Normandy, had decided to leave for the East, but they began questioning their purpose:

“We want to attack the enemies of God in the east after traveling great distances, while before our eyes are the Jews, of all races God’s greatest enemy.”

Pondering their options, the men took their weapons, captured many Jews, and killed them, adults and children alike, only sparing those who accepted conversion. Then they left for Jerusalem.

The Crusades fueled dozens and dozens of pogroms across Western Europe. In the late eleventh and early twelfth century, the pressure to convert was immense, and the risks of refusing to convert were even greater. A mid-twelfth-century Christian chronicler, Richard of Poitiers, acknowledged the great sufferings of the Jewish people at the outset of the early crusades, of which he underlined the unfairness. But the anti-Jewish sentiment in the Christian communities only grew stronger.

In the aftermath of the crusades, European Jews were at the center of rumours propelled by distrust and suspicion. In Blois, France, in 1171, Christians accused members of the Jewish community of having murdered Christian children during religious rituals. Called the “blood libel,” these accusations first appeared in England and were attested across Western Europe from the twelfth century to the modern era. In Blois, the blood libel accusations lead to the dramatic death of more than 30 members of the community. The survivors’ estates were confiscated. Ten years later, King Philippe Augustus expelled the Jews from the royal domain.

Anti-Semitism received the Church’s support in the early thirteenth century at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). The council invited kings and rulers to force the Jews of their kingdoms to wear a distinctive symbol on their clothes or a specific hat that would make them immediately recognizable by Christians. In 1269, Louis IX of France made the symbols mandatory.

The thirteenth century also witnessed the forced segregation of Jews to specific areas. Traditionally, Jews lived together in neighbourhoods often nicknamed juiveries (Jewries). Paris counted four juiveries at that time. When Saint Louis made the distinctive symbols mandatory, he also forced the Jews to live in Jewries. Forced residence in Jewries signalled the birth of “ghettos,” neighbourhoods reserved for the Jewish population of a given town.

In the aftermath of the fourteenth-century plague, many Jewries were equipped with gates locked at night to prevent people from entering or exiting the district. Jewries started to turn into ghettos. The point of the ghettos, some rulers argued, was to protect the Jews from the violence Christians perpetrated against them. But ghettos also functioned as traps and participated in marginalizing the French Jewish communities.

The first decades of the fourteenth century were marked by an economic crisis and recurring food shortages. Anti-Semitism was on the rise again. In 1319 and 1321, Parisians – Christians – manifested their hatred toward Jews by publicly burning the Talmud. The plague signalled a new era of pogroms and violence against the Jews, who became the “scapegoats” of the crisis. The chronicler Jean de Venette witnessed and described the consequences of the plague for the Jews:

Some said that the pestilence was the result of infected air and water… and as a result of this idea, many began suddenly and passionately to accuse the Jews of infecting the wells, fouling the air, and generally being the source of the plague. Everyone rose up against them most cruelly. In Germany and elsewhere – wherever Jews lived – they were massacred and slaughtered by Christian crowds and many thousands were burned indiscriminately.

As Venette states, Christians accused the Jews of having poisoned wells to spread the disease. In Toulon, southern France, 40 Jews were killed by fire right after the epidemic started. In Strasbourg, northeastern France, in 1349, hundreds of Jews who lived in the city’s ghetto were locked up in a building by angry Christians and set on fire. Similar massacres happened in the pontifical city of Avignon, and in Narbonne, Carcassonne, and Toulouse, to cite but a few southern French examples.

Pope Clement VI (1291–1352) issued a bull forbidding the killing of Jews, but to no avail. Distrust and hatred were so intense that the city of Strasbourg, in the Rhine valley, expelled all Jews from its jurisdiction and forbade them from entering the city. This law was only removed from the city’s policies during the French Revolution in the late 1780s.

In many ways, medieval anti-Judaism paved the way for modern anti-Semitism. From accusations of greed and avarice to the blood libel, from the wearing of distinctive symbols to mandatory residence in ghettos, the Middle Ages witnessed the development of a series of stereotypes and a system of repression that had repercussions far into the twentieth century and the modern day.

But the Jewish communities of medieval France did not always live in fear. They enjoyed times of peace and independence and were, usually, relatively integrated into urban communities. Their role in the intellectual renaissance of the twelfth century is especially remarkable and well-marked in historiography.”

- Lucie Laumonier, “Hostility Against the Jews in Medieval France”

#lucie laumonier #history #medieval #religion #jewish #french

[thundercrack]

Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification

By Aatish Bhatia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz July 24, 2023 (full text under the cut)

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.

The study — by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality — quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.

“What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,” said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.

In effect, the study shows, these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year. It comes as colleges are being forced to rethink their admissions processes after the Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional.

“Are these highly selective private colleges in America taking kids from very high-income, influential families and basically channeling them to remain at the top in the next generation?” said Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard who directs Opportunity Insights, and an author of the paper with John N. Friedman of Brown and David J. Deming of Harvard. “Flipping that question on its head, could we potentially diversify who’s in a position of leadership in our society by changing who is admitted?”

Representatives from several of the colleges said that income diversity was an urgent priority, and that they had taken significant steps since 2015, when the data in the study ends, to admit lower-income and first-generation students. These include making tuition free for families earning under a certain amount; giving only grants, not loans, in financial aid; and actively recruiting students from disadvantaged high schools.

“We believe that talent exists in every sector of the American income distribution,” said Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton. “I am proud of what we have done to increase socioeconomic diversity at Princeton, but I also believe that we need to do more — and we will do more.”

Affirmative action for the rich

In a concurring opinion in the affirmative action case, Justice Neil Gorsuch addressed the practice of favoring the children of alumni and donors, which is also the subject of a new case. “While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most,” he wrote.

The new paper did not include admissions rates by race because previous research had done so, the researchers said. They found that racial differences were not driving the results. When looking only at applicants of one race, for example, those from the highest-income families still had an advantage. Yet the top 1 percent is overwhelmingly white. Some analysts have proposed diversifying by class as a way to achieve more racial diversity without affirmative action.

The new data showed that other selective private colleges, like Northwestern, N.Y.U. and Notre Dame, had a similarly disproportionate share of children from rich families. Public flagship universities were much more equitable. At places like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, applicants with high-income parents were no more likely to be admitted than lower-income applicants with comparable scores.

Less than 1 percent of American college students attend the 12 elite colleges. But the group plays an outsize role in American society: 12 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives and a quarter of U.S. senators attended. So did 13 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners. The focus on these colleges is warranted, the researchers say, because they provide paths to power and influence — and diversifying who attends has the potential to change who makes decisions in America.

The researchers did a novel analysis to measure whether attending one of these colleges causes success later in life. They compared students who were wait-listed and got in, with those who didn’t and attended another college instead. Consistent with previous research, they found that attending an Ivy instead of one of the top nine public flagships did not meaningfully increase graduates’ income, on average. However, it did increase a student’s predicted chance of earning in the top 1 percent to 19 percent, from 12 percent.

For outcomes other than earnings, the effect was even larger — it nearly doubled the estimated chance of attending a top graduate school, and tripled the estimated chance of working at firms that are considered prestigious, like national news organizations and research hospitals.

“Sure, it’s a tiny slice of schools,” said Professor Dynarski, who has studied college admissions and worked with the University of Michigan on increasing the attendance of low-income students, and has occasionally contributed to The New York Times. “But having representation is important, and this shows how much of a difference the Ivies make: The political elite, the economic elite, the intellectual elite are coming out of these schools.”

The missing middle class

The advantage to rich applicants varied by college, the study found: At Dartmouth, students from the top 0.1 percent were five times as likely to attend as the average applicant with the same test score, while at M.I.T. they were no more likely to attend. (The fact that children from higher-income families tend to have higher standardized test scores and are likelier to receive private coaching suggests that the study may actually underestimate their admissions advantage.)

An applicant with a high test score from a family earning less than $68,000 a year was also likelier than the average applicant to get in, though there were fewer applicants like this.

Children from middle- and upper-middle-class families — including those at public high schools in high-income neighborhoods — applied in large numbers. But they were, on an individual basis, less likely to be admitted than the richest or, to a lesser extent, poorest students with the same test scores. In that sense, the data confirms the feeling among many merely affluent parents that getting their children into elite colleges is increasingly difficult.

“We had these very skewed distributions of a whole lot of Pell kids and a whole lot of no-need kids, and the middle went missing,” said an Ivy League dean of admissions, who has seen the new data and spoke anonymously in order to talk openly about the process. “You’re not going to win a P.R. battle by saying you have X number of families making over $200,000 that qualify for financial aid.”

The researchers could see, for nearly all college students in the United States from 1999 to 2015, where they applied and attended, their SAT or ACT scores and whether they received a Pell grant for low-income students. They could also see their parents’ income tax records, which enabled them to analyze attendance by earnings in more detail than any previous research. They conducted the analysis using anonymized data.

For the several elite colleges that also shared internal admissions data, they could see other aspects of students’ applications between 2001 and 2015, including how admissions offices rated them. They focused their analysis on the most recent years, 2011 to 2015.

Though they had this data for a minority of the dozen top colleges, the researchers said they thought it was representative of the other colleges in the group (with the exception of M.I.T.). The other colleges admitted more students from high-income families, showed preferences for legacies and recruited athletes, and described similar admissions practices in conversations with the researchers, they said.

“Nobody has this kind of data; it’s completely unheard-of,” said Michael Bastedo, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Education, who has done prominent research on college admissions. “I think it’s really important to good faith efforts for reforming the system to start by being able to look honestly and candidly at the data.”

How the richest students benefit

Before this study, it was clear that colleges enrolled more rich students, but it was not known whether it was just because more applied. The new study showed that’s part of it: One-third of the difference in attendance rates was because middle-class students were somewhat less likely to apply or matriculate. But the bigger factor was that these colleges were more likely to accept the richest applicants.

Legacy admissions

The largest advantage for the 1 percent was the preference for legacies. The study showed — for the first time at this scale — that legacies were more qualified overall than the average applicant. But even when comparing applicants who were similar in every other way, legacies still had an advantage.

When high-income applicants applied to the college their parents attended, they were accepted at much higher rates than other applicants with similar qualifications — but at the other top-dozen colleges, they were no more likely to get in.

“This is not a sideshow, not just a symbolic issue,” Professor Bastedo said of the finding.

Athletes

One in eight admitted students from the top 1 percent was a recruited athlete. For the bottom 60 percent, that figure was one in 20. That’s largely because children from rich families are more likely to play sports, especially more exclusive sports played at certain colleges, like rowing and fencing. The study estimated that athletes were admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same qualifications.

“There’s a common misperception that it’s about basketball and football and low-income kids making their way into selective colleges,” Professor Bastedo said. “But the enrollment leaders know athletes tend to be wealthier, so it’s a win-win.”

Nonacademic ratings

There was a third factor driving the preference for the richest applicants. The colleges in the study generally give applicants numerical scores for academic achievement and for more subjective nonacademic virtues, like extracurricular activities, volunteering and personality traits. Students from the top 1 percent with the same test scores did not have higher academic ratings. But they had significantly higher nonacademic ratings.

At one of the colleges that shared admissions data, students from the top 0.1 percent were 1.5 times as likely to have high nonacademic ratings as those from the middle class. The researchers said that, accounting for differences in the way each school assesses nonacademic credentials, they found similar patterns at the other colleges that shared data.

The biggest contributor was that admissions committees gave higher scores to students from private, nonreligious high schools. They were twice as likely to be admitted as similar students — those with the same SAT scores, race, gender and parental income — from public schools in high-income neighborhoods. A major factor was recommendations from guidance counselors and teachers at private high schools.

“Parents rattle off that a kid got in because he was first chair in the orchestra, ran track,” said John Morganelli Jr., a former director of admissions at Cornell and founder of Ivy League Admissions, where he advises high school students on applying to college. “They never say what really happens: Did the guidance counselor advocate on that kid’s behalf?”

Recommendation letters from private school counselors are notoriously flowery, he said, and the counselors call admissions officers about certain students.

“This is how the feeder schools get created,” he said. “Nobody’s calling on behalf of a middle- or lower-income student. Most of the public school counselors don’t even know these calls exist.”

The end of need-blind admissions?

Overall, the study suggests, if elite colleges had done away with the preferences for legacies, athletes and private school students, the children of the top 1 percent would have made up 10 percent of a class, down from 16 percent in the years of the study.

Legacy students, athletes and private school students do no better after college, in terms of earnings or reaching a top graduate school or firm, it found. In fact, they generally do somewhat worse.

The dean of admissions who spoke anonymously said change was easier said than done: “I would say there’s much more commitment to this than may be obvious. It’s just the solution is really complicated, and if we could have done it, we would have.”

For example, it’s not feasible to choose athletes from across the income spectrum if many college sports are played almost entirely by children from high-earning families. Legacies are perhaps the most complicated, the admissions dean said, because they tend to be highly qualified and their admission is important for maintaining strong ties with alumni.

Ending that preference, the person said, “is not an easy decision to make, given the alumni response, especially if you’re not in immediate concurrence with the rest of the Ivies.” (Though children of very large donors also get special consideration by admissions offices, they were not included in the analysis because there are relatively few of them.)

People involved in admissions say that achieving more economic diversity would be difficult without doing something else: ending need-blind admissions, the practice that prevents admissions officers from seeing families’ financial information so their ability to pay is not a factor. Some colleges are already doing what they call “need-affirmative admissions,” for the purpose of selecting more students from the low end of the income spectrum, though they often don’t publicly acknowledge it for fear of blowback.

There is a tool, Landscape from the College Board, to help determine if an applicant grew up in a neighborhood with significant privilege or adversity. But these colleges have no knowledge of parents’ income if students don’t apply for financial aid.

Ivy League colleges and their peers have recently made significant efforts to recruit more low-income students and subsidize tuition. Several now make attendance entirely free for families below a certain income — $100,000 at Stanford and Princeton, $85,000 at Harvard, and $60,000 at Brown.

At Princeton, one-fifth of students are now from low-income families, and one-fourth receive a full ride. It has recently reinstated a transfer program to recruit low-income and community college students. At Harvard, one-fourth of this fall’s freshman class is from families with incomes less than $85,000, who will pay nothing. The majority of freshmen will receive some amount of aid.

Dartmouth just raised $500 million to expand financial aid: “While we respect the work of Harvard’s Opportunity Insights, we believe our commitment to these investments and our admissions policies since 2015 tells an important story about the socioeconomic diversity among Dartmouth students,” said Jana Barnello, a spokeswoman.

Public flagships do admissions differently, in a way that ends up benefiting rich students less. The University of California schools forbid giving preference to legacies or donors, and some, like U.C.L.A., do not consider letters of recommendation. The application asks for family income, and colleges get detailed information about California high schools. Application readers are trained to consider students’ circumstances, like whether they worked to support their families in high school, as “evidence of maturity, determination and insight.”

The University of California system also partners with schools in the state, from pre-K through community college, to support students who face barriers. There’s a robust program for transfer students from California community colleges; at U.C.L.A., half are from low-income backgrounds.

M.I.T., which stands out among elite private schools as displaying almost no preference for rich students, has never given a preference to legacy applicants, said its dean of admissions, Stuart Schmill. It does recruit athletes, but they do not receive any preference or go through a separate admissions process (as much as it may frustrate coaches, he said).

“I think the most important thing here is talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not, and our admissions process is designed to account for the different opportunities students have based on their income,” he said. “It’s really incumbent upon our process to tease out the difference between talent and privilege.”

Source: Raj Chetty, David J. Deming and John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges”

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

For people who have spent their careers trying to expand access to rooftop solar energy, the announcement on Monday of $7 billion worth of project support from the Biden administration is almost unfathomable in its size and scope.

Money from the Solar for All program, which is part of the Inflation Reduction Act, will go to 60 recipients that include state and Tribal governments and nonprofit organizations. Its goal is to help lower-income and otherwise disadvantaged households obtain the financial and environmental benefits of solar.

“It’s a good day,” said Erica Mackie, CEO and co-founder of GRID Alternatives, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit that will receive two grants totaling more than $310 million and is involved with a third grant of $62.3 million.

These solar initiatives are a convergence of advocacy for clean energy and for environmental justice, based on the ideas that solar will help economically disadvantaged households reduce their energy costs and cut the use of fossil fuels. Once on the fringe and part of programs that often struggled for funding, these concepts have now reached the mainstream.

GRID Alternatives started in 2004 with the installation of two solar systems and has grown to about 500 employees who provide job training for solar installers and set up solar systems for qualifying low-income households.

Her group was well-positioned to be a successful applicant for Solar for All because it was already doing the kind of work envisioned in the program. This includes years of work in Tribal communities across the U.S. to install solar as part an effort to increase clean energy jobs and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

The Environmental Protection Agency selected the 60 Solar for All recipients from a pool of about 150 applicants. About $5.5 billion is going to 49 grants to states or state-level organizations; about $1 billion is going to five grants that cover multiple states; and about $500 million is going to six grants for Tribal governments or organizations that serve Tribal communities.

The largest grants are about $250 million each, given to three states (California, Texas and New York) and two applicants, including GRID Alternatives, whose work covers multiple states. The smallest grants are in the $25 million to $30 million range, including about $25 million for a partnership of the Hopi Tribe and Arizona State University to deploy rooftop solar on the Hopi Reservation.

#Solar for All program

[petervintonjr]

"The moment that I was questioned as a transgender woman raising a child I became a feminist."

Say hello to activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, 82 years old as of this writing and not about to ease up in the fight for trans rights. She faced many hurdles during her life --including homelessness and incarceration-- and it's these challenges that fuel her determination to this day. In 1969, Majors fought the police at Stonewall, right alongside Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson (see Lesson #94 in this series), and to this day expresses doubt that the promises of Stonewall have truly been kept --particularly in this cynical and opportunistic age of "corporate Pride." ("Who invited the motherf**kers from Home Depot?") In the 1970's, having herself been an inmate at New York's notorious Dannemora prison and Bellevue Hospital's so-called "queen tank," Griffin-Gracy provided direct services to trans women dealing with addiction and incarceration. In the 1980's she took it upon herself to care for people impacted by HIV/AIDS.

In 2005, Miss Major joined San Francisco-based Trans Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) as a staff organizer, and later as executive director, to lead the group's efforts advocating for incarcerated trans women. She has often spoken out against the prison system, which she says contributes to the incarceration of transgender individuals, particularly trans people of color and those with low incomes.

Now 82, Miss Major, known to many simply as "Mama," resides in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she continues to be a vocal activist. She founded and administers the House of GG, a retreat center for trans people and their families.

Read an absorbing interview with Miss Major from just this past week at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/black-trans-activism-miss-major-griffin-gracy-stonewall/

just out this year: Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek - https://www.versobooks.com/products/2787-miss-major-speaks

#black lives matter #teachtruth #dothework #pride month #pride #miss major

[justiceforsanda]

Justice for Sanda

Sanda Dia (20) was in his 3rd year of college at KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium when he decided to try and join the studentclub 'Reuzegom', a club almost entirely filled with white kids from rich or elitist families, of which many of its past members now hold a higher status in society. Sanda was multi talented and very ambitious and hardworking. He dreamed big, wanting to be make a future for himself and make his family proud. He hoped to become a Reuzegom member to solidify his own future, coming from a lower income household himself.

On December 4th of 2018 Sanda, along with the other two newcomers, would be forced to drink enormous amount of alcohol for their initiation into Reuzegom. Sanda had drank almost 2 bottles of gin and pints of beers, even more than the other two had. When nearly passed out, the members each urinated on him as is custom according to them. After taking him back to his student room that night, they taped off the faucet in the room to keep him from sobering up. Unsurprisingly, he did not feel much better the 2nd day of the initation. As seen on camera footage and told by eye witnesses he seemed to be in a bad state already. Even one of the members had pointed out he was completely out of it. During the next part of the initation on December 5th, Sanda and the other two were forced to dig a hole, which was to be filled with ice cold water. They’d be stuck here for the next 8 hours while being ridiculed and peed on, and forced to consume over a liter of fish oil. Then he’d have to swallow live goldfish, bring it back up, swallow it back down all until it was no longer alive. All of which was laughed about, filmed and photographed by the members of Reuzegom. He eventually passed out, his body no longer able to keep up. It wasn't until at least 2 hours of him being passed out (speculated that it took even longer) that he was finally taken to the hospital in this critical condition. He fell into a coma due to his extremely low body temperature and insane level of salt intake before his family could even get to the hospital to say their goodbyes. Sanda was in such critical condition that he died of organ failure less than 2 days later.

In these 2 days the members of Reuzegom were more concerned about covering up their tracks and deleting the evidence than the death they all caused. In recovered messages and statements the members talk about Sanda’s situation as if he was not in critical condition and felt no responsibility towards the situation.

The following 4 years they'd use their family's influence and money to finally end up being convicted to mere community service and a 400 euro fine. That’s not justice. This is a huge group of rich, influential families wiggling their way out of their involvement in Sanda’s death. They couldn’t know fish oil would kill him, but when you put someone in a cold bath, let them drink copious amounts of alcohol and other substances and they don’t look well, stop being able to respond and pass out… it’s clear that he was seriously not doing well. And their response to that was to let him suffer in this state for hours without giving him medical care. He could have lived, had they brought him in right away. They get to live on with their name and faces protected and mostly in tact, without real punishment, having the truth twisted to their own advantage.

Aside from the lack of proper punishment, none of them spoke up when Sanda’s father asked for clarification about what happened. The majority of them didn’t even care to show up for the final sentence. They didn’t even do the bare minimum of giving the family of their alleged “friend” any closure.

So why should their name be protected when they took his?

Jeff Jonkers, nicknamed Zaadje

One of the longer standing members and that years president of Reuzegom. In charge of most of it. Along with Alexander he took care to clean up the scene and make everyone delete photos, videos and messages.

His lawyer suggested to write an apology letter early on, in which he took no accountability and did not own up to what happened, or even offer a simple apology.

Alexander Garmyn, nicknamed Janker

In charge of planning the initation and taking care of the pledges that year. He has wrote he did not want this to be just a brutal year; he wanted it to be insanely brutal. He wanted the newcomers to look up to him in fear the night of their initation. (Also mentioned his “good friend Hitler” in this same speech). He talked specifically about Sanda’s heritage, and seemed to purposely put Sanda through a harder time than the other two newcomers. He filmed lots of the initiation and was the first to suggest deleting Reuzegom’s groupchat as soon as it became clear Sanda wasn’t going to make it. All the while he still held on to calling it a stupid accident instead of showing any remorse.

Also little fact: he caused one of the other initates permanent eye damage by throwing a full beer can in their face while they were passed out from the alcohol the club forced them to drink. When confronted about it he denied it and put the blame on the other initates, and manipulated them into keeping it quiet.

Leon Lesseliers, nicknamed Strontvlieg

Filmed lots of the scene as well and send the media out to friends. He seemed to have it out for Sanda more than the other newcomers as he’s made comments about wanting to give him a hard time specifically, and one of the other members pointed out he had said a lot of incriminating things about the situation and was physically aggressive towards them. He dumped his phone in a body of water as soon as he heard Sanda had passed, claiming later it was out of anger and shock (and not fear of them finding more evidence on his phone...)

Other members present that night:

Bram Lebleu (Rustdag) Jef Slosse (Flodder) Jerome Verstraeten (Igean) Viktor Knevels (Pronker) Zazou Bindi (Rafiki) Julian de Visscher (Placebo) Arthur Geheniau (Shrek) Maurice Geheniau (Kletsmajoor) Arthur Versavel (Sondage) Benoit Plaitin (Protput) Willem Peeters (Randi) Pierre Onghena (Wally) Simon Peeters (Remorke) Quentin Wauters (Paterberg) Maxime Peeters (Kelter)

#justice for sanda #justiceforsanda #sanda dia #reuzegom #jeff jonkers #alexander garmyn #tw death

[mariacallous]

Roughly one-third of children who grow up poor in the United States will also experience poverty as adults. Intergenerational poverty is a weight on the backs of millions of Americans, keeping many from achieving their full potential, for their own benefit and that of society.  Understanding the causes of intergenerational poverty, and implementing programs and policies to reduce it, would have important benefits for children and for the entire nation.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 directed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct a comprehensive study of intergenerational child poverty in the United States. The resulting report, entitled “Reducing Intergenerational Poverty,” was issued in September 2023.1 The authors both served on the committee that developed the report, and we provide our perspectives here on some of its key messages.

Key facts about intergenerational poverty

Intergenerational poverty was defined as a situation in which individuals who grew up in families with incomes below the poverty line are themselves poor as adults. Data from two intergenerational studies provided very similar estimates of the fraction of children born into low-income households in the 1970s or 1980s who also had low household incomes in adulthood. As shown in Figure 1, about one-third of children from low-income households remained poor in adulthood. Racial differences in this rate were stark, with considerably more persistence of poverty among Black and, especially, Native American children, the least persistence among Asian children, and similar persistence rates for white and Latino children.

These data also showed that:

More (40%) individuals with low household incomes in both childhood and adulthood are white than in other racial/ethnic groups. Although the rates of intergenerational poverty are lower for white than for Black and Native American children, Whites outnumber Black (34%), Latino (19%) and other racial/ethnic subgroups in the ranks of persistently poor children because they make up such a large share of the overall population.

Low-income children of U.S.-born parents experience less intergenerational mobility than low-income children of immigrants from almost every country.

An individual’s mobility is predictable by geography. Even within regions and individual communities, there are areas where low-income children tend to grow up and join the middle class, as well as areas where generations are more likely to remain mired in poverty. At the regional level, persistence rates are highest in the South and lowest in the Upper Midwest.

The spatial patterns of economic mobility vary by racial and ethnic group; nonetheless, disparities in economic mobility between Black and white children persist within virtually every community with substantial numbers of children in both groups.

The drivers of intergenerational poverty

We investigated the factors that appeared most likely to generate intergenerational poverty and for which we might be able to develop policy prescriptions. We began by delineating seven key areas in which child, family, or neighborhood characteristics strongly correlate with the later success of the child:

Child education and access to schools

Child health and access to health care system

Parental income/wealth and employment

Family structure

Housing and neighborhood characteristics

Neighborhood crime and the criminal justice system

Child maltreatment and the child welfare system

There were four areas with the strongest evidence for being key drivers of children’s long-term success:

Education and Skills: Educational attainment and occupational skills have large impacts on lifetime earnings. Achievement gaps (measured by test scores) in the educational process develop early in life, and these gaps go on to generate large disparities in high school and postsecondary attainment of children who grew up in low-income families relative to their high-income counterparts.

Child Health: Children growing up with low family incomes have worse health than other children, beginning even before birth and worsening as children age. These health disparities among children lead not only to greater disparities in adult health but also in education and earnings. Despite improvements from policy (like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act), many poor children lack access to health insurance coverage. Access to nutritional programs (especially in summer) and family planning services is limited as well.

Parental Employment, Income and Wealth: a. Low wages and employment levels drive the relatively low earnings and family incomes of the poor, which limits the ability of families to invest in their children’s health and education and to live in safe neighborhoods with good schools. Further, a lack of affordable childcare is an employment barrier. b. Parental employment is important, but employment gains that are not accompanied by income gains seem to have little positive effects on children’s development. c. Family wealth is also highly correlated with later child outcomes; however, causal evidence on wealth effects is limited.

Crime and Criminal Justice Systems: Although crime rates have mostly fallen in the past three decades (despite a recent increase in homicides), violent crime remains relatively high in many poor neighborhoods, and exposure to violent crime has a negative impact on children’s long-term education and earnings. At the same time, adolescents who reside in poor neighborhoods experience high rates of juvenile detention and incarceration, which also have negative effects on their future outcomes.

Policies to improve long-term outcomes of poor children

The committee reviewed a great deal of evidence on the long-term impacts of various programs and policies on the outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We identified programs and policies supported by strong causal evidence—based either on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or on natural (quasi-) experimental variation—of long-run impacts that improve the outcomes of these children when they become adults. In addition, we limited our lists of effective programs to those where there is at least some evidence of scalability—at a minimum, where programs were tested at multiple sites or where policies were tested and shown to have generated causal impacts.

With respect to our four major drivers, we identified the following policies and programs that have generated direct long-term impacts:

Regarding education

Recent research has consistently pointed to the beneficial impacts on educational attainment of increased funding for K-12 schools in poor districts. Evidence also supports policies that would increase the diversity of the teacher workforce—many children learn and attain the most when matched with teachers of a similar ethnic background. And research suggests that reducing the incidence of excessively harsh punishment of Black children (especially boys) would improve their longer-run outcomes as well.

An important policy goal is to increase college access for youth from low-income households and to give them a better chance of success while enrolled. In that context, we found that funding for effective forms of financial aid (such as the HAIL program in Michigan and the Buffett Foundation Scholarship in Nebraska) boosts enrollment in high-quality institutions and completion rates. Key support services, like guidance and case management, also raise completion for poor students.

We found that high-quality occupational training has lasting positive impacts on poor youth as well, especially on those who will not attend four-year college programs. These come in two forms: a) high-quality career and technical education (CTE), beginning in high school (e.g., Career Academies, technical high schools or pathway programs for grades 9-14, like P-TECH); and b) sectoral training, which equips low-income youth or adults with the skills they need for high-paying jobs in high-demand industries (e.g., Per Scholas, Year Up, and Project Quest).

Regarding child health

Given the strength of the evidence on the beneficial impacts of Medicaid on child and adolescent health, the federal government could consider ensuring that all poor parents and children have continuous access to Medicaid—including some populations (such as the undocumented) that sometimes lack such access. It is especially critical that mothers and infants have access to health care in the post-partum period. Access to nutritious meals for all children could be provided by expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Access to family planning services has proved its long-run value for child development as well.

Regarding parent employment and income

We found strong evidence that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) not only raises parental earnings and after-tax income but also increases children’s educational attainment, leading to upward mobility. We developed ideas for how federal or state governments could make the EITC more generous—during the phase-in of the credit, in terms of its maximum level, and/or in the phase-out stage.

There is strong recent evidence that the 2021 extension of the Child Tax Credit produced large reductions in child poverty, but we have no evidence to date on its long-term impacts on children. We believe that considering some extension for parents with little or no earnings makes sense, when combined with a more generous EITC for working parents.

Regarding crime and criminal justice

A number of policies and programs appear to reduce crime in poor neighborhoods. These include: a) funding for community nonprofit institutions; b) funding for abatement of vacant lots and abandoned buildings; c) putting more police on the streets and requiring them to use cost-effective tactics, such as community policing. Gun safety regulations can also reduce homicide rates (if they can pass constitutional review).

What about racial disparities?

Poor Black and Native American children suffer from particular drivers that worsen their outcomes and diminish the likelihood that they will experience upward mobility and escape poverty as adults. Large racial disparities persist on all of the most important drivers discussed above and reflect historical patterns of exclusion and racism as well as contemporary barriers.

For example, Black and Native American children suffer worse health and have lower educational achievement than other children. Some of this is due to residing in highly segregated regions with low-quality schools, as well as to experiencing excessive punishment relative to other groups. Unemployment is nearly twice as high among Black adults as among white adults, and labor force participation among Black men is much lower than among their white counterparts. Black youth and adults, especially males, perpetrate and are victimized by higher rates of violent crime (especially homicides and robberies), but they also experience much higher levels of detention in their youth and a higher incidence of later incarceration.

Historical episodes of racism, such as the Dawes Act of 1887 (which regulated the land rights of Native Americans on reservations) and the 1921 Tulsa riots against Blacks, have led to lower education and incomes for these groups, and research has shown2 that some of these effects persist today. We also have rigorous evidence showing that discrimination persists in health care, schools, housing, employment, and the criminal justice system. It should be noted, however, that some discrimination is “statistical,” meaning that real group characteristics are attributed to individuals by employers, teachers, or the police when clear evidence about those individuals’ personal skills or behaviors is not available. Descriptive evidence strongly suggests that “structural racism” persists, although clear definitions and direct causal evidence of its effects are only beginning to emerge.

At the same time, behavioral choices made by individuals in these groups when they face constrained opportunity—such as labor force nonparticipation and crime—worsen racial disparities in a range of outcomes, including employment and incarceration.

Fortunately, we also have clear causal evidence that several policies are effective in promoting the upward mobility of low-income Black children. For instance:

Increasing K-12 spending clearly boosts the educational performance of Black children;

monitoring and improving air quality improves their health;

expanding the EITC for parents raises the eventual earnings of Black children; and

reducing juvenile detention and incarceration improves the education and adult earnings of Black children.

Research priorities

In its efforts to identify promising programs and policies that would reduce intergenerational poverty, the committee was hampered by a lack of strong policy evaluation evidence. It identified three key research priorities for funders:

Prioritize strong research designs that provide causal estimates of long-term program impacts;

Set aside funding not only for rigorous small-scale experiments but also for replications and long-term follow-ups of promising programs at scale; and

Fund research arms for specific communities at highest risk

Improving existing census, survey, and administrative data—linked for families over time and across subject domains—would also be invaluable for promoting needed policy research on intergenerational mobility. Specifically, the report recommends that the White House Office of Management and Budget facilitate research on economic opportunity, intergenerational poverty, and related topics; and it suggests the federal government should make available existing census, survey, and administrative data to researchers, in a manner that respects and protects the confidentiality of respondents’ data.

Conclusions

Children who grow up in low-income families are much more likely than other children to be poor when they become adults. This both violates the notion of equal opportunity and limits the future productivity of the U.S. economy.

The NAS report “Reducing Intergenerational Poverty” documents an exceedingly diverse set of factors that affect a child’s chances of experiencing intergenerational poverty. The good news is that recent policy research has discovered an equally diverse set of programs and policies that appear effective in disrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty. None is a silver bullet, but evidence-based programs and policies in education, health care, employment/income, and criminal justice can all play an important role. Filling gaps in the long-run data available to the policy research community would help us add to this list. We hope the report spurs more research where needed and more policies to improve life outcomes for the nation’s children.

[poisonousquinzel]

As we've entered into the 2024 election year, I Beg you all that feel disappointment and rage at the disgraceful excuses for politicians we have in the US rn to look into the campaign of the two women shown in this video.

Claudia de la Cruz and Karina Garcia are running for President and VP in 2024. Here's their campaign video, as I can only include 1 vid per post. And here is their website.

I implore everyone who has the ability to vote in the November US election to read up on them.

Claudia De la Cruz (Presidential Candidate) is a mother, popular educator, community organizer and theologian. Being at the nexus of many different projects, organizations and social movements, Claudia connects different groups of people to link and merge struggles together in the overarching fight for justice. Born in the South Bronx to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, she was nourished by the Black and Caribbean working class communities of the Bronx and Washington Heights in the 1980s and 90s. At an early age, she was already questioning the conditions of poverty, violence, and oppression in her neighborhood, and what she saw and experienced served as her first entry point to understanding working class consciousness. When she was 13, Claudia began her political organizing work at her home church—Iglesia Episcopal Santa Maria (later the Iglesia San Romero de Las Américas–UCC), grounding her work on principles of liberation theology. She actively participated in campaigns to free political prisoners; to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, Puerto Rico; to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba; for the freedom of Palestine; against police terror—to name a few. In high school, she became a peer educator, conducting workshops on reproductive health and safe sex at community hubs and progressive churches, particularly for youth in the Bronx. It was through this work and her experiences as a working class Black Caribbean young woman that she understood there was only one solution to our collective problems: to fight for a better future, a socialist future

-

Karina Garcia (VP Candidate) is a Chicana organizer and popular educator who has been fighting for a better world since she was 17 years old as a high school student in California. From El Barrio in New York City to the border areas of Texas, she has helped lead campaigns against landlord abuses, wage theft, and police brutality, as well as fights for reproductive justice, immigrants rights and student financial aid reform. She is a founder of the Justice Center en El Barrio in New York City and is a member of the Central Committee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Karina’s father migrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was just 16 years old, and the will of working-class immigrants like him to survive and thrive inspired her to take on life with determination. This served her well when Karina received a full scholarship to study at Columbia University. She moved across the country by herself, knowing that she had to seize upon every opportunity to give back—a single year of tuition was the equivalent of her family's entire household income. As soon as she arrived, she joined every conceivable progressive organization on campus. She led struggles to expand financial aid for low-income students, for immigrant and worker rights, and to speak out against the Iraq war. In 2006, her activism received national attention when she led a campaign to confront and shut down the anti-immigrant fascist militia, the Minuteman Project. When Karina took a semester off to do a speaking tour in California, she met with high school and college students to keep building the movement for immigrant rights. That same year, she joined the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Graduating with a degree in Economics, Karina went on to become a New York City high school math teacher. After school, she advised a student group that protested against budget cuts, the Iraq war, police brutality and anti-immigrant laws. In 2012, she moved into a national organizing position for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice where she worked for nearly a decade training immigrant women and working-class Latina activists in New York, Texas, Virginia and Florida.

[Taken from the About The Candidates section on their website.]

Understand that despite the mainstream medias desperate attempts to make us believe that our choices are really just Biden and Trump that that is not true.

We have other options.

We have better options.

#not dc #karina garcia #claudia de la cruz #election 2024 #palestine #free palestine

[burritowitch]

okay- so- Justice League Twitch streamer au anyone???

So maybe the league itself is just a group of streamers who've been all doing their own thing but they all meet online and do streams together a lot. they'll play a lot of multiplayer together, ya'know? but what about what each of them does individually?

Bruce- man still wears the cowl. its just rubber but that man wears it like his life depends on it, and he makes all of his kids wear masks in front of the camera too. he's just this gruff muscular dude with a low voice but he's just like playing celeste and star dew valley and shit. alfred will pop up on his streams from time to time to bring him food, all the viewers love him. Dream levels of popularity, but he's just a good guy and he donates a lot of the streamer income cause he's already rich. all his kids also have channels, i'll probably expand on those in a later post.

Clark: you know he's being the hero in every game he plays. he chooses the nicest option possible, he can't bare to break the npc's hearts. plays a lot of strange games that no one is quite sure how he finds, but he'll also play minecraft with his sons. lois is also a staple, regularly popping in to say hi to the stream and will occasionally take the controller or whatever and absolutely decimate the game, when he's struggling he calls her and she figures it out almost immediately

Diana: assassins creed, cod, apex, she's playing those games. everytime people see her in person they're shocked to discover that she is 6'8" and absolutely towers over everyone else at cons. she'll occasionally go on rants about history and different greek myths during eight hour streams and no one can quite figure out how old she is. especially when she talks about world war one as if she was there.

barry: racing games, just any racing game. he definitely plays sonic. he talks really fast and half the time no one knows what he's saying, and if the signals bad enough you can't see his fingers, they're moving too fast. lots of rambling rants, he's an adhd icon in the streamer community. everyone loves iris, they just love her. same with wally, half his viewers just migrated to wally's streams when he started.

Oliver: he seems like the kinda guy to enjoy stuff like elden ring, god of war, skyrim, shit like that. he also occasionally brings a real bow on camera and from time to time his streams will be interuppted by him picking up the webcam and going outside to do some archery as a weird form of rage quitting. he and dinah are a streaming couple, she has her own channel tho i'll discuss more later

Hal: a halo dude for sure, that and doom. unlike the others, he's a part of a company. he streams with the other lanterns a lot by contractual obligation so those streams are pretty weird, like hal is playing halo while Kyle is drawing and jessica is playing super mario brothers and guy is playing the sims 2, no ones really sure whats happening.

Arthur: yknow all those raft games where you're lost at sea? those. all of them. hes got a hot tub set up in his gaming room so he'll be streaming from there a lot and theres the occasional beach and surfing streams where he just goes off talking about sharks and dolphins for twelve hours and it seems like he knows more than hes letting on anytime the topic of the lost city of atlantis comes up. (which is weirdly common for him)

Billy: he's a vtuber. everyone is sure he's an adult, but he's actually a kid streaming from his and freddy's shared computer at the vasquez's. he opens all his streams by yelling shazam, something that all of his siblings have taken to doing as well. definitely a zelda guy. actually, anything nintendo. he got a switch for his 12th birthday and he loves that thing so much. animal crossing, splatoon, mario cart, smash bros with his siblings. everyone is certain he's an adult until he shows up to a con panel with the league and he's backstage and people are like 'where'd this kid come from?' and he's like. 'oh yeah im here for the panel lol btw batman says we're on in five.'

Dinah: she's playing gta and cod along with the last of us and silent hill, but sometimes she'll just stream coming up with a new song and half her viewers don't even watch gamers or anything, theyre just fans of her music so they come to support her. she has a lot of simps, like a lot. nothing will get rid of them. like i said in oliver's section, they stream together a lot. but, they never stream in the same room. their gaming rooms are on opposite sides of the house, the only time they run into each other while streaming is during snack runs.

#justice league #twitch streamers #jl twitch au #burrito blogging #bruce wayne #batman #clark kent #superman #diana prince #diana of themyscira #wonder woman #barry allen #flash #oliver queen #green arrow #hal jordan #green lantern #kyle rayner #jessica cruz #guy gardener #arthur curry #aqua man #billy batson #captain marvel #shazam #dinah lance #black canary #more to come lol #prolly gonna do batfam #titans too probs

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jason L. Riley

Published: Sep 5, 2023

Yes, this is another September “back to school” column. My apologies. But someone needs to keep pointing out that our national debate over which books to allow in classrooms, or how to teach slavery to middle-schoolers, is far less consequential than the continuing inability of most youngsters to read or do math at grade level.

In Florida, where GOP governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has taken lumps for a couple sentences in a 200-page black-history curriculum, only 39% of Miami-Dade County fourth-graders are proficient in reading, according to a Miami Herald report last year on standardized test results. By eighth grade the number drops to 31%, and math scores are just as bad. Who cares if kids have access to books by Toni Morrison or Jodi Picoult if most of them can’t comprehend the contents?

These dismal outcomes have persisted nationwide for decades, and the racial achievement gap is even more disturbing. The U.S. Education Department reported last year that in 2022 the average reading score for black fourth-graders in New York on the National Assessment of Educational Progress trailed that of white fourth graders by 29 points. This “performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998,” the report added.

The progressive left’s response to these outcomes has been to wage war on meritocracy rather than focus on improving instruction. The goal is to eliminate gifted-and-talented middle-school programs, high-school entrance exams and the use of the SAT in college admissions. One defense of racial preferences in education for black students is that recipients, including those who go into teaching, are more likely to work in low-income minority communities after graduation. That’s true, but is it what economically disadvantaged students really need, more second-rate teachers?

In his lively autobiography, “Up From the Projects,” the late economist Walter Williams related an incident from his teaching days at California State University, Los Angeles in the late 1960s. A black student approached him at the end of the course and said he needed a B to graduate. The student told Williams that he wanted to teach school in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles. Williams replied that Watts didn’t need any more mediocre educators. He added, jokingly, “If you’d said San Fernando Valley”—a predominantly white area back then—“I’d have given you the B.”

Williams was appalled that many of his academic colleagues were holding their black students to lower standards. “There was no more effective way to mislead black students and discredit whatever legitimate achievements they might make than giving them phony grades and ultimately fraudulent diplomas,” he wrote. Sadly, the downstream effects of lax standards for black students that concerned him more than 50 years ago have only gotten worse.

Medical students in all 50 states must pass a licensure exam before they can practice. The exam has three parts, and Step 1 is administered at the end of the second year of medical school. It measures your grasp of basic science topics—anatomy, biology, biochemistry, pharmacology—and is highly predictive of how you will perform in medical school going forward.

A student’s numerical score on the Step 1 exam has long been the most important tool in evaluating candidates for the most competitive medical disciplines and residency programs. Three years ago, representatives of the nation’s leading medical groups voted to scrap numerical scores and report the results of the Step 1 exam as pass/fail.

The reason is simple, according to Stanley Goldfarb, an academic physician and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. In a recent book on how social-justice activism has affected medical training, “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns,” Dr. Goldfarb explained that black students underperform on the Step 1 exam. “The solution to the fact that white students score better on the exam was to eliminate reporting scores,” he wrote, which “makes about as much sense as Major League Baseball eliminating batting averages to assure that no ethnic cohort outperforms the others.”

Dr. Goldfarb’s book has an amusing title—which comes from an op-ed he wrote for this paper in 2019—but what it describes is nothing to laugh at. Those who complain about racial disparities in medical outcomes might consider how racial double standards contribute to them. Medical schools have been pressured to relax admission standards for diversity purposes, which has led to the relaxation of grading standards and licensure requirements.

Black doctors are more likely than white doctors to practice in medically underserved areas, but low-income blacks need second-rate doctors even less than they need second-rate teachers. For whatever reason, it seems lost on progressives that addressing the racial achievement gap in K-12 education would go a long way toward addressing the one in medical school.

[ Via: https://archive.is/HXGgR ]

==

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Reading, Grade 4) ]

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Math, Grade 4) ]

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Reading, Grade 12) ]

[ Source: National Student Group Scores and Score Gaps (Math, Grade 12) ]

This is honestly the thing that's the most troubling. There are activists in schools masquerading as teachers who insist it's a moral imperative to teach young children complicated postmodern intersectional conspiracy theories, yet can't - or won't - actually teach those same kids to read.

"Antiracist" teachers behaving like black kids don't need to learn to read, and it's more important that they understand their place in a perverted conception of social hierarchy, is a disturbing rehabilitation of the KKK's golden years.

#Jason L. Riley #bigotry of low expectations #merit #make merit matter #meritocracy #low standards #education #reading #literacy #antiracism #antiracism as religion #neoracism #religion is a mental illness

[sab-cat]

Jan 9, 2024

An Ohio woman faces criminal charges after she had a miscarriage. Brittney Watts was 22 weeks pregnant, and her pregnancy had been deemed non-viable just days earlier, when she miscarried in the bathroom of her home. Two weeks later, she was arrested on charges of felony abuse of a corpse for how she handled the remains. Amna Nawaz discussed the case with Mary Ziegler....

And I think Brittany Watts' case is remarkable in a couple of ways. There's a history, as the group Pregnancy Justice has documented, of laws criminalizing the actions of pregnant patients, particularly usually actions that were taken by low-income people, people of color, particularly substance abuse, sometimes of illegal drugs, sometimes of legal drugs like alcohol.

You almost never, or, to my knowledge, never see a prosecution of someone like Brittany Watts. Everyone has conceded that this pregnancy was already nonviable when the actions she took that have led to charges began. So this is, I think, both a continuation of a trend, but also an acceleration of a trend. This is something we haven't seen much before.

More context here (CNN)

#abortion #reproductive rights #racism

[eaglesnick]

Private Sector Good, Public Sector Bad? (2)

This is the second part of a look at former public services and utilities in Britain that have been privatised in the name of neoliberal economics and the mistaken belief that private enterprise is ALWAYS more efficient than publicly  run bodies.

Prisons

The first privately run prison in the UK was opened in 1992 under a Conservative government and private sector involvement in Britain’s penal system has grown steadily ever since. The UK is now second only to the USA in the number of privately run prisons.

Premier Custodial Group was formed in 1992 and in 2005 was the largest private company running UK prisons. It was a joint venture between the American private prison operator Wackenhut Corrections Corporation and the British firm Serco PLC. From a turnover of £7.52 million in 1994 it had increased its revenues to £127.4m, with pre-tax profits of nearly £10m, paying out a £2m dividend to shareholders. In 2002 Wackenhut was taken over by Group 4 Falck.

In 2003 Serco gained control of Premier, estimating that Premier's

 “income over the life of its existing contracts for five prisons, one secure training centre, two immigration facilities and court escort custody and electronic monitoring services was £2bn” (Cited in Prison Reform Trust: Private Punishment :Who Profits; January 2005)

Group 4 Securicor (G4S) was a company created in 2004 when Group 4 acquired Securicor. Since these takeovers these companies have gone from strength to strength, with Serco, G4S, and GEO Group branching into immigration and other services.

In 2018, the Guardian reported that the Home Office paid these companies:

 “hundreds of millions of pounds to run the UK’s immigration removal centres, but no one knows for certain just how profitable the industry is…Commercial confidentiality agreements mean the Home Office and outsourcing companies are not obliged to publish detailed financial information about immigration detention centres in the UK.” (Guardian: 10/10/22)

In 2022, one of these companies, Sodexo was awarded a £264 million UK prison contract over a ten year period. On receiving the contract, Paul Anstey, CEO, Government, Sodexo UK & Ireland stated:

“Our vision is to provide a secure and safe environment which reduces re-offending through education, builds new skills and offers respect, equality and inclusion.” (Facilities Management Magazine: 16/08/22)

If only that were true! As long ago as 2013 Sodexo Justice Services  was facing charges of prisoner torture and degradation.

'Cruel, inhumane and degrading': Female prisoner kept segregated in 'squalid' cell for five years.”  (Independent: 21/08/2013)

In 2016 a video of naked Prisoners pretending to be dogs led to an investigation into violence and humiliation of prisoners by Sodexo. In September 2017, a female prisoner died under Sodexo care. An inquest into her death concluded:

“serious failures at Sodexo run HMP Peterborough contributed to death of Annabella Landsberg”  (Inquest: 04/04/2019)

Another prison run by Sodexo was accused of residing over a “spice” epidemic, which led to the death of a male prisoner. (Manchester Evening News) In 2018 Sodexo was again accused of neglect and systematic failures resulting in the death of yet another inmate. In 2019, a different prison run by Sodexo was accused of “systemic breaches of inmate human rights”.

In February of this year 20 prison staff resigned from the Sodexo run HMP Lowdham Grange, which was deemed so unsafe the government was forced to take it over.

The appalling levels of service cited above are not restricted to Sodexo alone. In her book “Profiting from their misery: Britain’s private prisons”, Hatty Nestor reveals that:

“outsourcing companies like G4S encourage prisoners to work 40-hour weeks, all they are paid (is)  as little as £2 an hour. Such practices amount to slave labour. Companies are profiting from prison labour, paying fewer well-trained, low staff wages. In private prisons, staff are paid 23% less than public prisons, and they also outsource security, healthcare and cheap food. Private prisons aim for a profit margin of 8-10%, which is met by cutting costs and the increased exploitation of staff and inmates.”

Given that privately run prisons pay their staff less, are more overcrowded, and employ fewer prison officers you would think they would at least be more cost effective yet this isn’t the case. The governments own figures for 2022/23 reveal that it cost £32,762 per prisoner, per year in publicly run prisons, while the cost for privately run prisons was £33,628 per prisoner. (Ministry of Justice: “Costs per place and cost per prisoner by individual prison.", 21/0324)

 What is more, the government gives 23% of its allocated budget to private companies despite the fact their prisons only house 15% of the total prison population. It seems that whichever way you measure private prison success (apart form profits for its shareholders) private prisons do far worse than those still in the public sector.

[webshood]

Stephanie Brown should be half latina (brazilian), not because she's from the Narrows and not because she's from a low income household with a criminal parent, but because her mom gives me major "We named her Stephanie with an 'ph' instead of an F because it's different and chic" which is something my brazilian mom did (my sister's name has a "y" to look more sophisticated)

Stephanie should also get to brag that she has more body hair than Tim, she calls him a despenado (featherless bird) very often and one time she sent a screenshot of the bat group chat on the young justice gc and this was his profile picture, he kicked her out from their gc and blocked her contact immediately, it lasted three days

#brazilian stephanie brown #stephanie brown #dc comics #spoiler dc #batgirl #tim drake #red robin #japanese tim drake

[rjalker]

I’ve started calling the time we live in “The Great Forgetting.” Some call it “The Great Gaslighting.” Both are true.

By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened. The CDC switching its easiest-to-find map from the accurate community transmission map to one that shows the whole country in (fake) happy low-risk green. Biden saying offhandedly that “the pandemic is over” even as thousands of people die every week and groups like Long COVID Justice and #MEAction organize — from bed and in die ins in front of the White House — demanding that the U.S. declare long COVID a public health emergency. The state is acting like a bad boyfriend, a gaslighting partner telling you that nothing you remember is real. That’s not new, but the intensity level has reached a new high.

It shouldn’t surprise me. Of course, the state hates disabled people, even now that there are so many more of us. Of course, federal, state and local governments for the most part don’t want to pay for guaranteed income or disability payments or paid care work or accommodations. They want us to die slowly so they can save money.

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[petervintonjr]

“I was born and raised in the North, and I knew that there was discrimination… but I had never seen that type of hatred on the face of anyone before. It forced me to work harder, to come back and work harder. It forced me to take a good look at people that I knew and what was going on in my own community.”

Today we study the achievements of social justice giant Constance Mitchell, someone who truly understood the intrinsic connection between poverty and racial inequality, and infused that into her every action.

Born in 1928 New Rochelle, New York, little is known of the childhood or coming-of-age years of Constance (“Connie”) Mae Jenkins, but in 1950 she married Louisianan John Mitchell (part of the Great Migration) and moved to Rochester, New York –-the city for which she would forever be associated, despite her initial impression of a place where “people here didn't know how to smile and they weren't friendly at all.”  Her first foray into Rochester community activism was as a volunteer with the Delta Ressics, a group of Baden Street Black activists who pushed for better housing and living conditions for migrant farm workers living in shacks near Sodus.  She also fought against deplorable living conditions at the Hanover Houses, Rochester’s first low-income apartment complex.  

In 1959 at the urging of a fellow Delta Rassick, Walter Cooper, Mitchell ran for --and lost-- a race for a seat on what is now the Monroe County legislature (Ward 3, then known as the Monroe County Board of Supervisors).  However she made another run in 1961 and was this time successful, and was then re-elected in 1964: the first woman and the first African-American to be elected to that body --though not without enduring resentment, routine insults and slurs, and even threats from her fellow legislators.  From this position she and her husband came into regular contact with such figures as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, among many other civil rights leaders of the time --even entertaining visits from Malcolm and then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.  In the wake of the violent 1964 racial unrest in Rochester, Connie expressed in an interview for Life magazine, “I'm not telling you, I told you so. I'm saying please listen to us."  These two terms were the full extent of Connie’s political career but her commitment to civil rights was just getting started: in 1965, she walked alongside Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery, but while this heroic act itself disillusioned her, at the same time it reinvigorated her determination to improves lives and conditions in her own community. 

Perhaps one of Mitchell's enduring achievements was the founding of Action for a Better Community, a Rochester-based nonprofit devoted to helping people in low-income areas become more self-sufficient and lift themselves out of poverty.  She also worked closely with the United Way and the Urban League of Rochester, and created the Urban League Black Scholars program.  In later years (1978 to 1989), she became the Program Director for an initiative called PRISM (Program for Rochester to Interest Students in Science and Mathematics).  In 1993 Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson, the first elected Black mayor of that city, credited Connie with inspiring him to get into politics; and in 2013 mayor Lovely Warren, the first Black woman to be elected to that position, similarly credited Connie as a role model. 

In February 2017, Mitchell was awarded the Frederick Douglass Medal for outstanding civic engagement by the University of Rochester.  She died the following year (2018); today the Monroe Country Office Building bears her name at the Constance Mitchell Concourse.

Read a truly absorbing transcript of a lengthy 2008 interview with Constance and John Mitchell at: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/rbfs-CMitchell

#blacklivesmatter #blm #rochester #conniemitchell #constancemitchell #teachtruth #dothework #black lives matter #constance mitchell