Stephan: A christofascist leader speaks his truth, and it is as despicable as you might expect. People like this make up Trump's base, and they consider themselves Christians, and feel self-righteous.
Jerry Fallwell, Jr.
Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. is getting a Bible lesson on Twitter after some eyebrow-raising comments about poverty.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Falwell defended his consistent support for President Donald Trump and even claimed it may be “immoral” to not support him.
Falwell, who is president of Liberty University, also said there was nothing Trump could do that would endanger support from himself and other evangelicals.
But it’s Falwell’s comments about the poor that are getting the most attention.
“It’s such a distortion of the teachings of Jesus to say that what he taught us to do personally — to love our neighbors as ourselves, help the poor — can somehow be imputed on […]
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Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019
SAM FULWOOD III, - Think Progress
Stephan: America as a society doesn't like children, nor does it consider them very important to the country's future. Oh, of course" you probably love your children, most parents do, although you'd be amazed how many don't. But I am speaking about America as a culture and society. Why do I say this? Because that's what the data shows. (Look in the SR archive for
Why Doesn’t America Like Its Children?)
Nowhere is this clearer than in our public education system. American children rank at the bottom of the developed world in math, science, and language skills. They are also notably obese, drugged by medications, and physically unskilled. It has gotten so bad that the teachers are giving up, and leaving the field. This story accurately describes the present situation. Our social values are all wrong, and if we don't make fundamental and profound changes, our future as a country looks very bleak.
Citing low pay, widespread disrespect and potential opportunities in other fields, frustrated public-school teachers walked away from their classrooms in record numbers during 2018, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report based on U.S. Department of Labor figures.
Public education employees, including person in jobs as varied as community-college faculty, school psychologists and janitors, quitting their jobs at the fastest rate since such figures were first compiled in 2001. In the first 10 months of 2018, public educators quit at an average rate of 83 per 10,000 a month, the newspaper said, citing the Labor Department. Although the overall rate for U.S. workers was much higher — 231 jobs quit per 10,000 workers in 2018 — the figure for teachers and other public education employees was a record high and the continuation of a disturbing trend.
For years, teachers have complained that they’re overworked and under appreciated as states have stripped away work protections, cut school budgets and blamed them for student underperformance.
What’s more, as the private-sector labor market rebounded from the recession, teachers and other school workers have yet to get back to where they were more than a decade ago. “Funding for public education in several states hasn’t yet recovered […]
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Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019
Tonja Jacobi and Ross Berlin , Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago / Judicial Law Clerk to the Honorable Kevin G Ross of the Minnesota Court of Appeals - Aeons
Stephan: For the past several weeks as I witnessed the depressing increase in racism in American society, I had begun thinking about doing the research for a paper on why the Supreme Court seems to be so indifferent to what is happening. Then I came across this article and realized someone else had already done the heavy lifting on this topic. Here it is.
Supreme Court chamber
Credit: Wikimedia
The Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots, killing the African-American teenager Laquan McDonald; 14 of those shots were apparently fired while McDonald lay on the ground. It took four years and the expulsion of the state attorney general before the trial against Van Dyke for first-degree murder resulted in convictions for the lesser crimes of second-degree murder and aggravated battery this October. Before the shooting, Van Dyke ranked among the worst 3 per cent of officers in excessive force allegations, making him identifiable as a ‘problem officer’ even before he killed McDonald. This case is remarkable not for the violence committed by a white police officer against an unarmed African American, but because it involved a rare instance of the United States’ legal system scrutinising a police shooting. The courts in the US have done little to intervene more generally in the mass surveillance, mass violence and mass incarceration affecting people of colour.
Racial division has always been the transcendent theme of […]
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Wednesday, January 2nd, 2019
Gabrielle Canon, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Over the past week, as the year was coming to an end, I received three emails that have really stayed with me. One was from a reader from a town near what was the town of Paradise, California, a second was from Puerto Rico, and the third was from Houston. All three were sad and depressing stories of what the writers had gone through, or what family or friends have gone through, and the failure of FEMA. All three also thanked me for not forgetting them, and still doing stories on these areas when almost everyone in media has gone on to other things.
This got me to focus my thinking about the reality represented by those three emails. It left me with this conclusion: if your city or town is destroyed you really shouldn't have a lot of hope that the government is going to stay with you as you try to restore your life to some semblance of what it was, and who's going to pay for it anyway? Here is some actual data on this issue.
As crews continue to sift through the rubble in the aftermath of California’s deadly November fires, another battle is just beginning. Now that the flames have been extinguished, officials are trying to figure out how to pay for the enormous costs – and who will pick up the tab.
Thousands are still without housing across the state, hundreds of whom have spent the rainy weeks hunkered down in parking lots, waiting for Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) trailers to arrive, and crews are beginning the long process to remove the toxic debris, a process that costs more than $1,000 a parcel.
In the weeks since the fires were put out, more than $180m in grants and loans have been made available by state and federal agencies to survivors across the state, and more than 24,100 families have applied for federal disaster assistance. The number is likely to be a fraction of what the agencies will spend in the coming years on the disaster. For the 2017 California fires, which were […]
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