Preventing people from voting because they owe legal fees or court fines muzzle low-income Americans at a time in our nation’s history when the rich have more political power than ever.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are being denied the right to vote because they are poor.

In nine states, Republican legislators have enacted laws that disenfranchise anyone with outstanding legal fees or court fines. For example, in Alabama more than 100,000 people who owe money – roughly 3 percent of the state’s voting-age population – have been struck from voting rolls.

This is unconstitutional. In 1964, the 24th amendment abolished the poll tax, a Jim Crow tactic used to bar poor blacks from voting.

These new laws are a modern reincarnation of that unconstitutional system, disproportionately disenfranchising people of color.

Income and wealth should have no bearing on the right to vote. Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet. But they still have a constitutional right to make their voices heard.

Preventing people from voting because they owe legal fees or court fines muzzle low-income Americans at a time in our nation’s […]

2 Comments

Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan

Shortly after President Trump took office, House Speaker Paul Ryan could feel just how close he was to finally achieving the goal he and his party colleagues had dreamed about for decades. With Republicans in uncontested power in Washington, he tweeted, they had a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact real comprehensive tax reform and get our economy moving.” Many Trump supporters thought reform meant relief for the “forgotten Americans” he talked about on the campaign trail. But Republicans had other plans, intending to take a wrecking ball to the system of American government that has been in place since 1933 and replace it with one based in their own ideology. If the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” becomes law, they will have succeeded.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this bill. It is a poison pill, killing the New Deal. The series of laws put in place by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress in the 1930s regulated business so employers could […]

No Comments

Top officials in the Republican Party have suggested in recent days that they will pursue major entitlement reform following the likely passage of massive tax cuts in the near future.

Those officials, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), have been egged on by their party’s grassroots, which is seeking to capitalize on the party’s legislative momentum in an attempt to alter Medicare and Social Security.

“Many, including Speaker Ryan, realize that this is a challenge that has to be addressed sooner rather than later,” Jason Pye, Vice President of Legislative Affairs at FreedomWorks told The Daily Beast. “Cuts to discretionary spending are always welcome, but this represents around 25 percent of outlays over the next ten years. Mandatory spending, including entitlements and earned entitlements, is around 65 percent of outlays.”

Efforts to revamp both Medicare and Social Security, two of America’s bedrock entitlement programs, have been undertaken in the past. And those who have done it—from Democratic administrations to Republicans—have either failed or suffered politically when they’ve succeeded.

For that reasons, other key figures within the conservative movement have urged […]

No Comments

How researchers classify and quantify causes of death across a population has evolved in recent decades. In addition to long-recognized physiological causes such as heart attack and cancer, the role of behavioral factors—including smoking, dietary patterns and inactivity—began to be quantified in the 1990s.

More recent research has begun to look at the contribution of social factors to U.S. mortality. In the first comprehensive analysis of such studies, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that poverty, low levels of education, poor social support and other social factors contribute about as many deaths in the U.S. as such familiar causes as heart attacks, strokes and lung cancer.

The full study findings are published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Public Health.

The research team, led by Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, chair of Epidemiology, estimated the number of U.S. deaths attributable to social factors using a systematic review of the available literature combined with vital statistics data. They conducted a MEDLINE search for all English-language articles published between 1980 and 2007 with estimates of the relation between social factors and adult all-cause mortality. Ultimately they considered 47 studies for meta-analysis.

After […]

No Comments

Mexico’s adult obesity rate has soared since the adoption of Nafta in 1993. Credit: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

As Donald Trump’s administration throws sharp elbows in trade negotiations and systematically rescinds regulations introduced by Barack Obama, one casualty is likely to be efforts to fight the global obesity epidemic. Left unchecked, rapidly rising obesity rates could slow or even reverse the dramatic gains in health and life expectancy that much of the world has enjoyed over the past few decades. And by forcing its food culture on countries like Mexico and Canada, the United States is making the problem worse.

One of the paradoxes of modern global capitalism is that whereas more than 800 million people in the world do not have enough to eat, an estimated 700 million people (including 100 million children) are obese. Of course, the two are not necessarily directly related. A considerable proportion of world hunger occurs in countries suffering from domestic strife or severe government dysfunction.

The obesity epidemic, however, has a much broader footprint, affecting 

No Comments