I confess I do not comprehend how any politician with any integrity could use adequately feeding children as a political maneuver. And yet Republican members have been doing this routinely as if it were no big deal.
Unlike other federal nutrition programs, WIC funding has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. Credit: Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty
Congress’ failure to include extra aid money for low-income moms and babies in last week’s spending bill sets up a potential showdown early next year.
At stake: whether the government will have to begin turning away large numbers of mothers and their children from the program, known as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, breaking with decades of precedent.
Unlike other federal nutrition programs, WIC funding has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support, with Republicans and Democrats committed to ensuring every eligible mother and baby who applies for the program can receive benefits. That consensus is now fraying, with House Republicans pushing to pare back WIC spending this year, arguing tough cuts are needed across the government amid the nation’s mounting debt.
The result, advocates and state-based WIC administrators fear, is that they may have to begin putting people on waitlists to receive aid like breastfeeding support, […]
This is the most sensible thing I have read about the immigration issue in many months. The corporate media has made a complete hash of this trend, and most peopledo not have a correct understanding of what is going on. This interview will being clarity and accuracy.
A family is overcome with emotion after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on September 28, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. Credit: John Moore / Getty
Immigration has been a touchstone of United States political debates for decades, and several cities claim to be at a “breaking point” as they struggle to absorb and support arrived migrants. But is there really a border crisis? And why are cities like New York unable to cope with the influx of migrants when their numbers are not unusual by historic standards? Have the Biden administration’s changes in asylum laws made a difference? Is there a “solution” to the migration “problem”? Avi Chomsky addresses these questions in an exclusive interview for Truthout.
Avi Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of the Latin American studies program at Salem State University. She is the author of many books, including Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice (2022); Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (2021); “They Take Our Jobs!”: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration (2007); and Undocumented: How Immigration Became […]
Here is a good essay on the struggle going on about climate change. You would think this would be a simple issue, but it isn’t. Greed for profit and just unhappiness about change itself has made this issue far more complicated than it needed to be.
A levee on the Mississippi River in Louisiana, during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Credit: General Photographic Agency / Hulton Archive / Getty
In the late 19502, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies — which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains — worked well for holding back intermediate amounts of water. But they gave people a false sense of safety. After a levee went up, sometimes more people actually built and moved onto the land behind it. Then, if an oversized flood eventually poured over or broke through the levee, the disaster could damage more property and cause more havoc than it might have before engineers began meddling.
The paradox would become a classic lesson in how not to adapt to the hazards nature might throw at the human-built environment. It was also an important cautionary tale for an even […]
Over my life I have travelled to 119 countries, including several involved in war or civil violence. Some I have especially enjoyed. Some I have loathed. One of the things I particularly pay attention to is: Can I walk alone at night? Japan, China, Sweden, Netherlands, Taiwan, Canada never give it a thought. Argentina, Columbia, and parts of Mexico, take great care. The United States, like Mexico it depends on where you are. But I never anticipated what this study shows. America has become a country where in spite of statistics showing the crime rate has gone down in many cities the general anxiety about walking alone at night has gone up. Given that gun wounds are the leading cause of child death and hundreds of mass murders every year it is not hard to understand the growing anxiety and the sense that the United States is a dangerous place to live.
Credit: Roan Lavery, Unsplash
Concerns about certain crimes are at their highest levels in decades, causing Americans to isolate themselves from their communities, according to new polling.
A recent Gallup poll found that 28% of Americans worry frequently or occasionally that they will be murdered, according to a Nov. 16 news release. That’s a near-record high.
The Gallup poll surveyed 1,009 adults between Oct. 2 and Oct. 23, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Meanwhile, half of U.S. adults said they worry their car will be stolen or broken into, 37% worry they’ll be mugged and 32% are concerned about getting attacked while driving — near-record highs.
Additionally, the vast majority of Americans, 72%, worry they will fall victim to identity theft, according to the poll.
This heightened apprehension has had a detrimental effect on the […]
The military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower warned, is beyond corruption. Americans spend via their taxes more on the military-industrial complex than the budgets of the next seven nations of the world combined. It has become a legitimized vampire scam whose corporations suck more money out of the American people than any other scheme in the world. And it cannot pass an audit. Even worse this failure causes nothing to change. We can’t spend enough to see that American children get enough to eat but there is essentially no functioning limit on what the military and the corporations that service it get.
Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder holds a press conference at the Pentagon on Oct. 19, 2023. Credit: Kevin Dietsch / Getty
The U.S. Military appears unfazed in its inability to account for billions of dollars. On Thursday, the Department of Defense failed its sixth consecutive audit — but hailed its “incremental progress.”
As the Pentagon budget nears a watershed $1 trillion — the largest of any federal government agency — it has never passed a single one of the annual audits mandated by Congress. In a press briefing, the Department of Defense said it had no timeline for passing an audit.
“We’ve heard the same platitudes about audit progress for years,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “They’re meaningless, especially since the Pentagon can’t even commit to a timeline for achieving a clean audit.”
“We’ve heard the same platitudes about audit progress for years. They’re meaningless.”
Former Pentagon comptroller Thomas Harker, now the secretary of the Navy, had publicly set a deadline of 2027 […]
