Category Archives: US News

Mainstream Media Picks up Oswald Krell Post on Tax Inequality in Rhode Island

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

If you listen to most politicians in Rhode Island, they will try to tell you that we can’t tax the rich because “they might leave us!” Well, if we had national legislation to tax the rich such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is proposing, they wouldn’t have anywhere to go. And furthermore, it’s just not true that our neighboring states are tax havens compared to us. From RI FUTURE (still one of the only sources for independent political thought in the state!):

The median state is Mississippi. The poorest 20% pay about 10.8% of their total income in taxes. The top 1%, OTOH, only pay 5.5% of their income.

In other words, the effective tax rate of the bottom 20% is about twice as high as the tax rate for the top%–despite paying no fed taxes.

And how does RI stack up? We’re worse.

Here, the bottom 20% pays about 11.9%, while the top 1% pays 5.5%.

In other words, the bottom 20% pays a rate that is more than twice the rate paid by the top 1%.

And Mass is two spots worse, CT is one spot better, so spare me the “Oh, I could just move to Mass and save all this money” lie. And founder of a certain ‘alternative’ party, I’m looking at you.

This story was picked up by Ted Nesi at WPRI Eyewitness news. You know the local mainstream media isn’t running the way it used to (yes, Projo, I’m looking at you) when we are getting some of our better news analysis from nom de plume bloggers.

Internet Censorship and SOPA

Posted on by ninjanurse

by Elaine Hirsch

What is the future of SOPA?

In October of 2011, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with its Senate counterpart, Protect Internet Providers Act (PIPA). Ostensibly designed to strengthen legal responses against the illegal distribution of copyrighted material, these bills caused a firestorm in the internet community. Opposition to the bill focused on two points: the dramatic expansion of power that would allow the US government to take action against internet service providers for material posted by individuals using those providers, and the expansion of government power that would allow the US to take action against “online service providers, Internet search engines, payment network providers, and Internet advertising services” in other countries accused of engaging in illegal activities.

Supporters of the bills touted them as the next step in strengthening legal protections for copyright holders (for example film studios and software manufacturers) against the pirating of their material. Some criminology experts and opponents said that the bills are overgeneralized, and allowed draconian measures such as blocking an entire domain for the actions of one individual using that domain. In noting that the phrase “enables or facilitates” in the bill is so broad in scope that even email falls under the category of enablement, Techdirt analyst Mike Masnick makes an effective point: the entire internet—an interconnected network—by definition enables piracy.

Are SOPA and PIPA needed?
On January 19, 2011, as sites such as Wikipedia initiated a blackout in protest of the bills, the U.S. Department of Justice was engaged in shutting down Megaupload, one of the world’s largest file-sharing services of copyrighted material. Two years earlier, in November 2009, the Pirate Bay, another site famous for file-sharing of copyrighted material, was the subject of blocking by a number of countries in Europe and Asia, and the owners taken to court. These famous cases strongly suggest that existing measures are fully adequate in providing authorities all the power needed to take action against sites engaged in illegal activity.

While the bill has been withdrawn for revision, it is by no means dead. A number of companies such as YouTube and Google support alternative legislation such as Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN), legislation designed to protect “Fair Use” policies while targeting more specifically those individuals engaged in illegal activities, without the sweeping new powers contained in SOPA. It is possible that free speech advocates and those interested in providing the government additional powers to shut down illegal sites may come to a consensus and come up with more effective legislation. One thing is clear, the two sides are far from finding that consensus at present.

Elaine Hirsch, Kmareka’s West Coast correspondent, blogs as a labor of love.

Forks over Knives and Portlandia

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

No, they’re not really related, but both are great viewing material. Forks over Knives is sobering and reminds us all to eat our vegetables. Portlandia is just plain hysterical — skits riffing on all the outrageous people in Portland and beyond. BTW, the Mayor of Portland portrayed in the skits has an uncanny likeness to Linc Chafee. He is seen bouncing on his exercise ball, working on his “core” while chatting with young musicians about writing a song to promote about Portland.

Here’s the trailer for Forks and Knives:

We’re Number One! We’re Number One!

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Here in Rhode Island, the littlest state in the nation, we don’t get to say we’re number one very often. But here’s our chance: right now it appears that we’re number one in the country for screwing the public sector worker out of long-term financial security. From the Associated Press:

Despite jeers and the threat of a lawsuit from public workers, Rhode Island lawmakers on Thursday night approved one of the most far-reaching overhauls to a public pension system in the nation.

The proposal is intended to save billions of dollars in future years by backing away from promised benefits to state and municipal workers in the state-run pension plan. Lawmakers called Thursday’s vote one of the most wrenching they’ve had to cast, though the fight may not be over if unions follow through with promised lawsuits.

When I look around the street I live on, which is a modest street in its home values, I see a lot of my neighbors who are going to be impacted by this. The cumulative loss of the additional cost-of-living increase might well cost some of these individuals their homes someday. These are teachers, administrative workers, and security workers for the state, just to name a few.

Treasurer Raimondo’s response for why EngageRI, the organization that supports her agenda, does not need to disclose its financial backers is because pension reform “benefits everyone.” This is just a bald-faced lie. A large percentage of our state’s workers just lost a big piece of long-term income security. They are now going to have to clamp down on spending and save more to fund their own retirements. These are people who will not be able to give to nonprofits or support that local band fundraiser or go out to eat but once in a blue moon to save the extra money.

If we want to benefit everyone, we need to take from those who have too much. The “too much” line in my mind gets drawn when we are talking millions and billions in income and assets. When enough people finally realize what is going on and the top 5% start to pay their share again, we might have enough money to rebuild our country. But by then, we may be too far gone.

Occupy Providence Setting up More Permanent Camp in Burnside

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

From the notes posted on the Occupy Providence community page on Facebook, it appears that the movement is building an encampment that they hope will last the winter. Hopefully their legal defense will hold up as long as their physical encampment, as they have reportedly hired Miriam Weizenbaum (of DeLuca and Weizenbaum,the firm where Taveras Senior Legal Counsel Matt Jerzyk used to work — small world!) to represent them legally in the eviction case filed by the City of Providence.

Amend the Constitution Now, Before Elections Get Even More Distorted by Corporate Money

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Senator Whitehouse and others have introduced legislation to amend the constitution so that corporations can not qualify as people who can give unlimited cash to campaigns. From Whitehouse’s press release:

In 2010, the Supreme Court concluded in a highly contentious 5-4 ruling that corporations deserve the same free speech protections as individual Americans, enabling them to spend freely from their corporate treasuries on campaign advertising.

“The flawed Citizens United decision allows corporations, including international corporations, to use their vast wealth to drown out the voices of the American people, and it allows them to do so anonymously from behind shell organizations,” said Whitehouse. “We must ensure that government works for the American people, not powerful corporations. The constitutional amendment we are introducing today will undo the Citizens United decision, putting people in charge as the Founders of our country intended.”

Given the shocking amounts of money flowing into elections now, including school board elections such as the recent Denver School Board elections in which the winners were mostly cash coffer candidates for oil companies and other powerful corporate interests, it is becoming glaringly apparent just how much damage the recent Supreme Court ruling has done to our election process. We are being inundated with corporate pressure to change our educational systems in ways that make everything “data-driven” and, in my opinion, strip much of the humanity out of education.

If you want to think about what might be done to improve education, I recommend reading Aaron Regunberg’s post that gives attention to the evolving “Student Bill of Rights” — a student-driven movement to define what students want and need to succeed educationally. Interestingly, there is nothing in their bill about needing more data-driven analysis and standards that declare whole systems (usually systems in poor urban areas) to be failures. The students come back to the basics: that they need good food, access to health care, and access to the full range of educational (including the arts and humanities) in order to benefit fully from their education.

Occupy Providence on Sunday Afternoon

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Facilitation Meeting at Occupy Providence

We finally made it to Occupy Providence today, to provide some pictures and a report from the heart of the movement. Ninjanurse has been doing us proud with daily posts all week, despite lots of other forces in her life that would normally take over and render a person incapable of blogging. But Nancy, like the Occupy Providence movement itself, is undaunted by it all, and keeps bringing us back home to the essential messages that make the Occupy movement worth joining.

While we were there, the Episcopal church provided a service of prayer in support of the movement. There were probably 50-75 of us, amidst another hundred to two hundred people occupying the park. The tents are plentiful and colorful, and General Burnside has also been decorated.

WPRO was there interviewing one of the Occupy members. The group did a “Mic check” to get everyone’s attention and then announced about when and where to gather to go the action at Sheldon Whitehouse’s community dinner. This action was leaving at 5 pm to bring a group of members to show the presence of the movement outside the Senator’s community dinner, and also to have a member of the movement ask the Senator his views on the Occupy Providence movement when he takes questions after the dinner.

A friend had dropped off some food for us to bring — a 10 pound bag of potatoes, 10 pounds of rice, some big cans of beans, some fruit. We handed them in at the food tent, where it appears they are making food and providing food for free all day long.

The feeling there, on this splendid Fall afternoon, was one of peace and hope. People were meeting and talking in earnest about what the next moves would be. People were praying together, looking up at the beautiful clear sky, and around at the other like-minded people in their presence. There were many dogs being walked, and petitions being signed, and regular Americans wandering around and wondering at where we are and how we got here.

Ending the War in Iraq?

Posted on by ninjanurse

Dear Readers,
Kmareka welcomes our new Mideast expert, Kevin De Jesus,PhD, who sends us this post on the consequences of war and the long road for survivors, both in the US and Iraq. Thank you, Kevin, for looking beyond our war-weariness to confront the reality our veterans and their families face…

Ending the War in Iraq?

Not so simple, as war’s legacies endure through the family.

Media outlets across the globe have reported that President Obama has declared that “America’s war in Iraq will be over by the end of the year”. This is not the first time the Iraq war has been declared “over”. Recall President Bush announced on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln that the war in Iraq had ended, in fact some nine years before this war will foreclose by virtue of a full troop withdrawal.

I believe we must rebuff the notion that the Iraq War will in fact be so neatly over – it is indeed this type of mythic conception of war that leads us to be deluded into thinking war, partly due to our ability to fight at such a high-tech capacity from great distances, is so precisely so simple. I argue, rather, that many battles will continue between here and the Euphrates, battles which will be waged through the legacies of war’s reverberations through families, across their everyday social, emotional and relational lives. Can we argue therefore that an ethically-committed politics, particularly among those of us who opposed the war in Iraq here in the US and across the globe, ought to drive a sense of urgency to remain focused on easing and supporting the lives of those whose life will be continually encroached by the long-reach of the hauntings of political violence that share a different sense of time than President Obama, or for that matter of Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki.

Let us consider some of the evidence for this argument I make. MIT’s Dr. John Tirman’s informative blog, “Iraq: the Human Cost” reveals an array of threats to human well-being across the duration of the war, and in particular, as in the case of many of the displaced, the long-term impoverishment, dislocation and erosion of rights and protections, that are long-standing in effect. Tirman notes that other threats, lethal and devastating in terms of human impact includes the exposure of children to landmines and cluster bombs used in Iraq by both US and non-US military and para-military actors. Fortunately, Iraq has joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2009 , however, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor (2011), Iraq remains “massively contaminated” with explosive remnants of war, due to the succession of violent conflicts which have embroiled Iraq for decades, including the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War and the 2003 US-led invasion. {For the full report, link here. }

What role will the US and other coalition partners play in clearing these munitions, particularly that according to UNICEF and UNDP decades are likely needed to clean up the terrain of Iraq .

How will families of cluster munition injuries secure the resources needed to rebuild their family life, meet the cost of disability, and heal social-psychological wounds, as a part of the Obama-Maliki plan to end the Iraq war? Is, in fact, such a matter of the human legacy of war also legitimate part of ending war?

Central to the family is the matter of the disappeared. According to a recent NPR report (July 20, 2011), Iraqi family members of disappeared persons gather each Friday to alert the world to their plight. It is claimed by NPR that since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “tens of thousands” of new missing/disappeared persons have been reported, with a particular increase in 2006 and 2007. How will Obama and Maliki deal with the matter of secret prisons, enforced disappearances, and the families of the disappeared who live the war in a particular way, day after day?

For American families who have endured the Iraq War vicariously, through their deployed loved one, the risk of developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) may be higher than in veterans themselves, one clinician has found. The military family advocacy organization “The Sanctuary for Veterans and Families” details an array of threats to the well-being of veterans from Iraq and their families, including homelessness, supports for women veterans, resources for the children of veterans and the development of community-based psychological supports for veterans and their families. Top on the agenda of The Sanctuary for Veterans and Families is legislative advocacy.

Perhaps an ethically-committed politics can begin with taking the lead from The Sanctuary. Recognizing that for so many the war will not be over by the close of the new year, can those of us who were so ardently opposed to the Iraq War, continue to actively engage to ensure that the resources vitally needed to continue to ameliorate the effects of the war on families from both the Iraq and the US, be delivered?