Women’s rights are increasingly under attack in the United States. Since last year, 13 states, including Kansas, have enacted laws banning insurance coverage of abortion in the health insurance exchanges created by the federal health care reform law. Some states have gone even further, aggressively restricting abortion coverage even in private insurance plans sold outside the exchanges. The Kansas statute, which is being challenged in court, forbids abortion coverage (except to save a woman’s life) in comprehensive insurance plans sold in the state, but permits companies to sell a separate rider covering abortion care for an additional cost. It also bars abortion services in policies sold after 2014 in the new exchanges. That part of the law, which also contains only a single exception limited to life endangerment, does not allow for a separate rider for broader abortion coverage. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Kansas, argues persuasively that the law is unconstitutional because it essentially levies a tax on a constitutionally protected procedure. 
August 29, 2011
August 27, 2011
For a hundred years, poll taxes were used throughout the South to keep African-Americans from voting. As Representative John Lewis points out:
Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri, and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification. 
Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes. Conservative proponents have argued for photo ID mandates by claiming that widespread voter impersonation exists in America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. While defending its photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of actual voter impersonation at any point in its history. Likewise, in Kansas, there were far more reports of U.F.O. sightings than allegations of voter fraud in the past decade. These theories of systematic fraud are really unfounded fears being exploited to threaten the franchise. In Georgia, Florida, Ohio, and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. 
August 24, 2011
There’s a new billboard along the 2100 South freeway just west of 5600 West in Salt Lake City. “Don’t believe in God?” it asks. “You are not alone.” The billboard was purchased by the Utah Coalition of Reason with a grant from the Washington D.C.-based United Coalition of Reason, and it will remain up through Sept. 19. “We’re hoping to reach a lot of people on their way to the Utah State Fair,” said Elaine Ball, director of the Utah coalition. “We want everybody to know we’re coming together as people who are atheists, agnostic, or freethinking and open to discussing ideas. 
We’re not trying to convert or de-convert people.” The Utah Coalition of Reason also seeks to act as a counterbalance to public discussions embracing religion and the blurring of lines between church and state. “It’s a concern that candidates embrace God publicly,” she said. “We’re in a political climate where it’s not acceptable to embrace humanism. We’d like to change that.” Among other things, the Salt Lake City billboard is part of a national campaign that seeks to remove any social stigma from those who do not believe in a deity. Non-believers are inundated with religious messages at every turn. This is just one, tiny counter assertion. The day after an article appeared, a local newspaper columnist wrote about being showered with emails denouncing the atheist billboard in terms he could not print. They are most afraid of “freethinking and open to discussing ideas”, attributes very rare in Utah and completely absent from Utah politics.
August 21, 2011
Throughout history, societies have struggled with how to deal with children and childhood. In the United States and elsewhere, a broad-based “child saving” movement emerged in the late 19th century to combat widespread child abuse in mines, mills, and factories. By the early 20th century, the “century of the child,” as a prescient book published in 1909 called it, was in full throttle. Most modern states embraced the general idea that government had a duty to protect the health, education, and welfare of children. Child labor was outlawed, as were the sale and marketing of tobacco, alcohol, and pornography to children. Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children. By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. 
In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform. But the 20th century also witnessed another momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation. Lawyers, policy makers, and business lobbied successfully for various rights and entitlements traditionally connected, legally, with personhood. New laws recognized corporations as legal — albeit artificial — “persons,” granting them many of the same legal rights and privileges as human beings. In an eerie parallel with the child-protective efforts, “the best interests of the corporation” was soon introduced as a legal precept. A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations, and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children. Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations. 
Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments. Children today are also exposed to increasing quantities of toxic chemicals. We know that children, because their biological systems are still developing, are uniquely vulnerable to the dangers posed by many common chemical compounds. We also know that corporations often use such chemicals as key ingredients in children’s products, saturating their environments. Yet these chemicals remain in circulation, as current federal laws, enacted with corporate profits in mind, demand unreasonably high proof of harm before curbing a chemical’s use. The challenge before us is to reignite the guiding ethos and practices of the century of the child. As Nelson Mandela has said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” By that measure, our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul. Greed is strangling us all, and, as always, children are harmed the most.
August 17, 2011
A dispute over breast-feeding at a Salt Lake City grocery store has sparked plans for a nationwide nurse-in this Saturday, when moms armed with hungry babies are expected to descend on dozens of Whole Foods Markets. Angelina Love, 23, was nursing her 17-month-old son while shopping at the Trolley Square store this June when an employee asked her to cover up. Another customer had complained after seeing Love feed her child with her tank top-style dress pulled down beneath her left breast. Love was shocked. “A breast-feeding woman is feeding her child,” she said this week. “She’s not exposing herself.” An employee explained that some customers found the behavior offensive. Several other employees arrived and said there were other places in the store she could nurse with more privacy, such as the café. 
They said they were trying to please everybody. “You’re putting shame on me and my family by telling me to cover up or asking me to move,” Love said she told the employees. The mother and employees couldn’t come to any resolution, so Love took the manager’s phone number and walked out of the store with her family. Now she is asking Whole Foods to develop a pro-breast-feeding policy and training that would prevent a similar confrontation from happening again. The corporation, which is welcoming the nurse-in, says such a change is in the works. “The bottom line is some people made some mistakes and we have addressed that internally,” said Libba Letton, a Whole Foods spokesperson. “This nurse-in is a great way to bring attention to an important issue.” Utah has one of the highest percentages of breast-feeding moms in the nation, according to the 2011 report card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 85 percent of children are breast-fed at some point, with 61.5 percent still nursing at six months, compared to 44.3 percent nationwide. If Love returns to Whole Foods and nurses her son, she will not be asked to cover herself, Letton said. A complaining customer would be told about the policy. But Love said, “I’m not going to shop in that store again until they make it sure this won’t happen again. Nursing a child is normal and not something unsightly that should be hidden.” I agree, and to support that, I plan to be at Whole Foods Saturday to keep an eye on things.
August 15, 2011
This year's State of the Union address was only the second since 1948 by a Democratic president that did not mention poverty or the poor. And the President and Congress have not promoted a bold jobs program. "When the banks had a national emergency, they bailed them out and they found $700 billion," said Cornel West during a nine-state Poverty Tour with Tavis Smiley. 
August 13, 2011
After World War II, Germany was divided into four zones, one for each of the victorious armies. The three western powers, Britain, France, and the United States, merged their zones into what was West Germany, but the zone controlled by the Soviet Union remained separate. 
As a result, Germany was divided into two countries. By 1961, more than 2.5 million of East Germany's 19 million people had moved to the West to escape the looting of the country by the Soviets and the political oppression. With thousands leaving every day, communist authorities feared the exodus would seriously undermine the state. So, on August 13, 1961, 50 years ago today, the East German regime began sealing their border. In Berlin, soldiers blocked off the streets, cut off rail links, and began building what was initially a barbed-wire fence. 
August 10, 2011
This is an example of what it’s like living in our corporatized country:
Verizon’s executives are trying to squeeze workers when Verizon's profits have more than tripled, and its CEO, Lowell McAdam, is getting more than $18 million in compensation. This squeeze on workers – 45,000 of whom went out on strike this week – comes just after Verizon’s top five executives gave themselves hefty raises while raking in more than a quarter-billion dollars over the past four years. 
And, the company claims record profits. Yet it's busy demanding major concessions from workers instead of putting those profits into broadband deployment. And when it isn’t trying to take away workers’ benefits, Verizon is busy dodging taxes while netting vast benefits from American taxpayers and exacting political favors from Congress and the FCC. This is the same company that's suing the FCC to kill even the weakest Net Neutrality protections. It’s the same company that got caught blocking smartphone apps and text messages it didn’t like. Today Verizon is squeezing its workers. Tomorrow it plans to squeeze customers through price gouging and by eliminating the right to choose the information we need online. Instead of trying to punish workers, nickel-and-dime its customers, and kill consumer protections, Verizon should spend its vast profits to bring broadband to more Americans. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. God bless America.
August 1, 2011
The debt ceiling deal struck last night does not tax the rich or even allow temporary tax cuts on the rich to expire. Nor does it defund any wars. Yet it requires cuts of $1.2 trillion now and $2.5 trillion over a decade. Details of much of the cutting will be worked out by a new 12-member Super Congress empowered to cut any spending, 
