by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Injustice has no borders, as we at Oxfam know well from years of experience working in more than 90 countries. We also know that poverty has no political party in our own country, the United States.
Last week Oxfam released a new study that dispels many of the political myths surrounding the nation’s minimum wage debate. It shows not only that increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour would give some 25 million workers across America a much-needed raise, but also that, on average, one in five workers in every single congressional district in America – red or blue – would benefit from such a raise.
In fact, according to our data, a hike in the minimum wage would benefit more than 55,000 workers in the average congressional district.
We found that the workers who would gain most are concentrated in districts that are remarkably diverse, from highly condensed urban areas to poor rural areas. At the top of the list is East Los Angeles (31.8% of workers), followed by the largely rural south coastal district in Texas’ 34th District (29.9% of workers). A district in the San Joaquin Valley of California is next, followed by more districts in Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley. Next on the list are districts in Dallas-Fort Worth (28.8% of workers), the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas (28.5% of workers), El Paso (27.9% of workers), the Bronx (27.6% of workers), and the boot heel of Missouri (27.3% of workers).
Raising the minimum wage would equally help Americans who live in Republican and Democratic districts, rural and metropolitan. It would also pump money into the economy and save billions in taxpayer dollars by reducing the number of low-wage workers receiving federal assistance. It seems an obvious thing to do.
From 1938, when a federal minimum wage was established, to its most recent increase in 2007 – passed by overwhelming majorities in Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush – most members of Congress recognized that as the cost of living goes up, so should the minimum wage. So why has the issue become bogged down in partisan politics that do little to serve our people or our future?
We are lucky enough to live in a wealthy democracy, but Oxfam is seeing the same growing problem of inequality in America that we see in developing countries: Relatively few people hold more and more power. In principle, the United States is the land where all people are created equal. But in reality, political power is stacked in favor of the wealthy.
Because of this imbalance, millions of hard-working Americans can’t stop falling behind, working at jobs that pay under $10 per hour and rarely offer benefits – some not even a day of paid sick leave.
Our study found that at least one-fourth of Americans work at jobs that pay so little that they cannot sustain themselves and their families without turning to government programs or going into debt. The average age of a worker who would benefit from a minimum wage increase is 35. Most (55%) are women. Over a third are parents of dependent children.
These are people like Tenesha Hueston, a single mother of four in Zebulon, North Carolina, who, according to a New York Times article in November, was making $7.75 an hour as a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant. Or Nick Mason, a father of two in Hixson, Tennessee, who made $9 an hour as an assistant manager at a pizza chain. They work these jobs year after year, while trying to care for their own children and parents, struggling to pay their bills. For them and people like them, the American Dream is a distant mirage.
According to our analysis, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would lift more than 5 million Americans out of poverty and help 14 million children see a boost in their family income. Fourteen million women, including 6 million working mothers, would get a raise. Three million single parents would be better able to sustain their families.
The sad irony of the standoff in Congress over raising the minimum wage is that petty partisanship gets in the way of a deal that would benefit large numbers of constituents in every congressional district, seemingly a boon to elected representatives of both parties. At least, that has been the logic that led to bipartisan support for increasing the minimum wage 22 times before now.
Members of Congress from each party need to be willing to overcome the divide: to be open to the debate, to consider the needs of hard-working constituents and taxpayers, to consider the wide range of benefits – and ultimately, to give a raise to the people who need it the most.
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
It breaks my heart to read about the death of James Boyd, a homeless man shot and killed by Albuquerque police in March. Boyd was apparently mentally ill.
His death recalls the January shooting of Keith Vidal, the North Carolina teenager who, his family says, suffered from schizophrenia and who was shot and killed after police arrived to help with a crisis.
Many details of that case are still unclear, and it’s hard to know who or what is responsible.
Tragically, incidents such as this appear over and over again in the news. The scenario goes something like this: Police are called to assist with a person who is experiencing a mental health crisis. There is an escalation in tensions, perhaps the introduction of a real or imagined threat, and this leads to someone getting hurt or, worse, killed. And it’s not always the person in crisis; sometimes, it is the police officer.
Another all-too-common outcome is that the person in crisis ends up not at the hospital but at the jail. Police officers, families and certainly people with mental health conditions don’t want this to happen. And it doesn’t have to.
There is a time-tested, well-researched way to lessen the likelihood that calling the police for assistance will end badly. In 1988, an approach was developed in Memphis that has been slowly – too slowly – making its way throughout the country. It’s called Crisis Intervention Team Training, usually just referred to as CIT.
Here’s how CIT works: A team of police officers (or other first responders) from one department or jurisdiction, or from a coalition of neighboring departments, undergoes a comprehensive week-long (40-hour) training program that does several things. It teaches some basics about mental illnesses, substance abuse disorders and developmental disabilities, and it explains how to recognize and interact with someone with these conditions who is in crisis.
News reports indicate that the detective who was put on administrative leave after the Keith Vidal shooting had not completed the CIT program, though others in the Southport Police Department, where he served, had. If true, we can’t know whether this would have changed the outcome, but it most certainly could have helped.
A cadre of community experts provides the training. They include fellow police officers, mental health professionals, family members and people who live with mental health conditions. In addition to clinical information and learning about community resources (and how to link to them), trainees hear personal stories, acquire de-escalation skills and put knowledge into practice through role play.
Officers and people who have had their own crises act out a number of no-holds-barred, real-life scenarios. They also get a sense of what it’s like to experience extreme mental health symptoms, such as hearing voices. It’s not always pretty to watch or listen to, but the outcomes of the CIT training show great promise.
Research shows that when CIT trained officers respond to a call, there are myriad benefits. The use of physical restraints goes way down, as do injuries to people in crisis and to officers. People are less likely to be arrested and taken to jail. And because officers know how to connect people to community services, the need to use the most expensive emergency services can sometimes be avoided. Equally valuable is the goodwill that CIT engenders. Officers report greater satisfaction in knowing how to help people, and citizens report greater trust in their police.
If cities as large as Philadelphia and Houston and rural communities such as New River Valley in Virginia and Cambria County, Pennsylvania, can institute CIT, why aren’t there teams in every community? Of course, it costs money to pull officers off the street, to train police dispatchers, to pay for materials and for costs associated with using community buildings. Grants from government entities and foundations can at times help to offset these costs. And much of the training is done by volunteers.
While the basics of the training program remain the same, it must be tailored to each locality. Therefore, more than anything else instituting a CIT program takes commitment and coordination. This usually begins with a person, or small group of people, building a coalition of community stakeholders. How many fewer tragedies might there be if more people stepped forward to become CIT champions?
‘My brother just needed help, and now he is dead’
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Checking the weather display for our departure from JFK Airport in New York to London’s Heathrow Airport, an awkward blob of green, yellow, and red is sprawled diagonally across most of the New England coastline. Studying the computer in Operations, the routing filed with ATC (air traffic control) appears to navigate through the least intense area of a very wide storm system. I pick up the company phone, taking a rare opportunity to consult with our dispatcher located in a central location at our main hub almost 1,400 miles away.
The term “Republican leadership” has become the biggest oxymoron in politics. If we learned one thing from Republicans’ elections, it’s that their leadership simply follows their tea party base in an unceasing march to the right.
Following their losses at the ballot box in 2012, Republicans rolled out a post-mortem calling for a move to the middle, recognizing that their days as a competitive national party were numbered if they continued on their current rightward path.
Since then, we have seen Republicans across the country do the exact opposite. They have grown more paranoid, more insular and more fearful. It’s that fear of the tea party that shut down the government to disastrous consequences last year, and it’s that fear that just caused them to replace one leader of the Republican shutdown with another.
In 2011, when John Boehner took over as speaker, he was billed as a moderate. And Eric Cantor was called mainstream. But both alternated between being hamstrung by and kowtowing to their right wing and drove their majority off a cliff.
And the numbers speak for themselves: after three and a half years, they have turned Congress into the least-trusted institution in America. Gallup now pegs confidence in Congress at just 7% — the lowest confidence rating for any institution ever recorded by Gallup in the past 40 years.
With ratings that abysmal, one might think that House Republicans might use a turnover in leadership as an opportunity to steer their sinking ship in a new direction. Think again.
Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise are members of the same tea party club and were elected on pledges of fealty to the tea party agenda. And that agenda will keep turning off the American public, dragging their ratings down and dragging Republicans further and further outside the mainstream.
The tragedy is that the middle class pays the price.
How did we get to this place, where the House majority continues to move so far from the center of American politics that they can no longer see it? NBC News provides some clues, finding in its polling that “the Tea Party is in a VERY different place on key issues” than even other, mainstream Republicans.
Take immigration as an example. Just 19% of tea party Republicans believe immigration helps the United States, compared to 47% of the country at large. With House Republicans beholden to this tiny minority of the country at large, they will continue to drag their party to the right — and their so-called leadership will have no choice but to follow, if they want to keep their jobs.
You can change the names on the door, but the out-of-touch agenda remains the same. If the country is to have any hope of combating the serious challenges facing us and creating an economy that works to lift up middle-class families, we need more than just a change of figureheads in the House.
We need to change the House majority.
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Amazon’s new Fire Phone isn’t a phone. It’s a shopping mall. Not that boring shopping mall slowly dying on the edges of suburban America, but a gorgeous mall with infinite selection and endless opportunities for entertainment, from books to movies and everything in between.
The price starts at $199 with a two-year contract, or $649 without a contract. The Fire Phone may well give its competitors a run for the money.
Malls are social spaces, and so is Fire Phone. Its five cameras and assorted sensors are exactly what is needed to create immersive interactive experience. And what better thing to socialize around than using it to identify new products, deals and scoops? The only piece missing from Amazon’s new mall is food, but you can be sure that soon, there will be an Amazon Fresh truck waiting around the corner or an Amazon aerial drone hovering just over the horizon ready to deliver your order.
Amazon is pretty late to the mobile space, and if Fire Phone was just another well-designed mobile device, it wouldn’t have a prayer of catching up to Apple or Google. But Amazon isn’t playing catch-up, it’s changing the game by shifting the focus of mobile devices to what it does best: Satisfying our seemingly endless desire to buy stuff.
Google is still struggling with creating a shopping strategy for physical products, and Apple is little more than an elegant specialty store in cyberspace. In contrast, Amazon pioneered online shopping and has reinvented the shopping experience time and again. Fire Phone is just the latest chapter in that long history.
A crucial feature in the Fire Phone is Amazon’s Firefly technology, which turns the phone into a one-touch information source for anything that can be viewed with the phone’s many cameras. You see a cool jacket on an actor in a movie – capture the image and Amazon will find it for sale. If you hear a song you like, grab a sample and Amazon will tell you the artist and offer to sell you a copy.
Or, next time you are at your favorite suburban mall, snap a picture of a product in a physical store and Amazon will offer it to you for less. This may be the most diabolically disruptive aspect of the Fire Phone.
While Apple and other companies are building out physical stores at great cost as part of their shopping strategy, Firefly allows Amazon to invade every store in every mall on the planet and turn it into a de facto showroom for Amazon.
This will drive retailers crazy. Expect to hear much about how Fire Phone is going to kill physical shopping in the days to come. I wouldn’t be surprised if some stores attempt to ban Fire Phone entirely.
Once upon a time shopping was mainly “bricks-and-mortar:” an exclusively physical retail experience. After Amazon appeared on the Web, shopping evolved to “bricks-and-clicks:” an expanded shopping reality that provided shoppers the option of visiting either a physical space or a virtual space. Doomsayers proclaimed the end of physical stores, but while online shopping has been profoundly disruptive, the physical shopping experience evolved to coexist with shopping in cyberspace.
We are now moving from “bricks-and-clicks” to “bricks-in-clicks:” a world where the line between physical and virtual not only blurs, but becomes a two-way conversation.
Getting competitive pricing with your phone camera is just the start. The next phase will be “augmented reality” shopping. Want to see if that elegant lounge chair really fits in your living room? Select your chair, hit a button and it appears on your screen as if it were actually in your room. You can even walk around the chair, viewing it from multiple perspectives. Sounds futuristic, but iPhone and Android users can experience this today with apps like Sayduck. With five cameras and multiple sensors, Fire Phone will be able to do this with even greater fidelity.
Amazon’s Fire Phone is being released at a moment when we are seeing the rapid growth of the so-called “Internet of Things,” where billions of physical objects from toothbrushes to satellite sensors are being connected to the Internet.
Before long, shoppers wandering into a physical store won’t use their phones to merely take a picture of an object; they will have a phone-mediated conversation with that object. And when that happens, Jeff Bezos will probably reinvent things again.
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Checking the weather display for our departure from JFK Airport in New York to London’s Heathrow Airport, an awkward blob of green, yellow, and red is sprawled diagonally across most of the New England coastline. Studying the computer in Operations, the routing filed with ATC (air traffic control) appears to navigate through the least intense area of a very wide storm system. I pick up the company phone, taking a rare opportunity to consult with our dispatcher located in a central location at our main hub almost 1,400 miles away.
The administration’s new coal rule could singlehandedly give the Republican nominee in 2016 a path to victory in an Electoral College that has been getting more and more difficult for the GOP.
States that have trended Democratic can flip back red.
Hello Ohio, the GOP has certainly missed your 18 Electoral College votes.
Pennsylvania (20 votes) and Michigan (16 votes) had all but turned blue, but with higher utility bills coming to voters before 2016, both are right back in play for the GOP.
Win two of those three states and the Republican wins the White House.
Virginia’s 13 electoral votes just got a lot more winnable, too.
There is a reason the President did not act so aggressively on his environmental agenda until after his re-election. It would have doomed his campaign. His political advisers responsible for his re-election would have never allowed it.
The political folks are gone now and the President does not have to think about things in a political context anymore; he gets to think about himself and the history books.
But what’s a legacy issue for Obama may not be a good thing for Hillary Clinton.
To achieve the President’s goal of a 30% emissions reduction will cost money, a lot of money. Much of the money will come from working families paying higher utility bills in an already difficult economy. Jobs will also be lost as businesses grapple with higher energy costs.
The EPA itself estimates electricity costs will increase up to 7% by 2020, critics say it will be far higher. The critics will be right on this one.
In 2014, the debate for Senate candidates will be about the prospect of higher utility bills. In 2016, the debate will be about actual higher utility bills.
It will be interesting to see the first presidential poll in Ohio after utility bills spike. If I’m a Clinton adviser, it is already giving me nightmares.
When voter’s utility bills go up, they get mad. Just ask the Labor Party in Australia. They got decimated last year for passing a carbon tax.
Just five days before Election Day in 2010, Labor party Prime Minister Julia Gillard vowed at the National Press Club, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”
That promise was not kept and a carbon tax went into effect in 2012.
As a result of the carbon tax, Australian utility bills went up over $500 per household a year. Public opinion turned on a dime. Gillard was removed from the 2013 ballot by her own party before a sure defeat and was replaced by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It made no difference.
Now, on behalf of his legacy and place in history, President Obama and his EPA are going to make things difficult for the left in America in 2014 and beyond.
And all Hillary Clinton can do about the EPA rule that is creating an electoral minefield for her 2016 bid is applaud.
Clinton cannot be critical of the EPA rule or she could risk alienating her base and losing a second nomination fight. The environmentalists are a powerful force in Democratic primary politics, especially on the money side.
The 2016 presidential campaign just got a lot more interesting.
Michigan and Pennsylvania, welcome back to presidential politics, you are now again swing states.
The path to 270 electoral votes for the Republican nominee just got a lot easier.
And President Obama may have just denied Hillary Clinton the White House, for a second time.
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
I’m reading a terribly sad book these days. It’s a book that I thought would uplift me during the doldrums of second-year medical school, and renew in me a sense of hope. It’s called “The Audacity to Win,” and it’s a memoir of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
When I’m finished with my patient write-ups at night and get into bed, the book returns me to a time when politics inspired millions and speeches could take your breath away. The election turned out to be a landslide, and news anchors paused to reflect on the historic nature of the hour.
My classmates cried with joy, and my parents saved every newspaper they could find. A young team of visionaries was headed for the White House, and the nation was ready for change. During Obama’s transition to office in 2008, he had an 82% approval rating. There was something in the air.
And then I close the book. Cutting to the present is a rude awakening, like snapping out of a dream. It’s hard to remember those days of optimism – they seem a distant memory, a sad reminder of opportunities gone by. Change indeed happened, in the years since I cast my first ballot. It was simply nothing I could have imagined.
I credit Obama with great and varied accomplishments, from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to our military exit from Iraq, the end of “don’t ask don’t tell,” to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, I believe that partisan obstructionism has upended too many efforts to push our nation forward: immigration reform, a public option for health care, and closing the base at Guantanamo Bay, among others. But, after the countless times in which I have found myself defending the Obama administration to colleagues and peers, I’ve reached a limit to the explanations that I can provide. I’ve reached a point of political despair.
Republican obstructionism cannot explain allowing the bugging of foreign leaders, nor having drones strike innocent children overseas. It cannot explain having the National Security Agency collect data on the private lives of Americans, nor prosecuting whistle-blowers who reveal government wrongdoing. It cannot account for assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, without a trial, nor shirking public funding and spending limits during presidential campaigns.
It cannot justify the findings of a report that says the White House’s efforts to silence the media are the “most aggressive … since the Nixon Administration”.
And, most recently, it cannot excuse the failure to design a functional website more than three years since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law.
I don’t know if this is what I should have expected. If, at 18 years old, I was supposed to figure out that governance may contradict the political campaigns that precede it. Obviously, elective office isn’t a predictable course, as the opposing political party and random events, such as the Newtown massacre, will shape our public conversation. Yet, of all of the examples that I have listed above, they largely seem to be of the administration’s own choosing. That is what troubles me most of all.
I voted for Obama again in 2012, but not because I was excited by his candidacy. Mitt Romney presented a confusing and unrefined alternative who could not seem to lock down his policies or his positions. I felt that a second term for Obama, free from the pressures of future elections, would fulfill the hope that we had heard of for so long.
Still, as Obama’s approval rating sank below 45% this week, returning to 2008 through that book has become that much harder. It makes me yearn for the many promises that disappeared.
This week I was reading the portion of the book describing how Obama suffered a huge loss to Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary. At a post-mortem campaign meeting, he told his staff that they needed to get back on track and stay true to the purpose of their cause. ” ‘I want us to get our mojo back,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to remember who we are.’ ”
It’s five years later, Mr. President, and I couldn’t agree with you more.
Note: A previous version of this article referred to “the failure to design a simple website”; it’s been updated to reflect the author’s view that he should have used the term, “a functional website”.
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