We also have an op-ed by Raul A. Reyes on the Heritage Foundation’s ill-fated report that was supposed to pinpoint the high cost of giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. As Reyes explains, this “study” instead exposed the think tank’s shoddy research standards and the racist outlook of one of its lead authors.

OtherWords normally releases all our newsroom-ready commentaries on Wednesday mornings, but we make exceptions for work tied to breaking news. Following the resignation of disgraced report co-author Jason Richwine, we ran this op-ed on Saturday instead. We’re increasingly tinkering with our timing, so please visit our website more often. When you do, be sure to check out our blog, where we offer bonus commentaries by Jim Hightower. This week, we’re featuring our columnist’s hilarious salute to Rep. Louie Gohmert and other political “nincompoops.”

Here’s a clickable summary of all our latest commentaries and a link to our new cartoon. If you haven’t already subscribed to our weekly newsletter, please do.

1. The Swinging Electorate / Marc Morial
   Despite formidable efforts to disenfranchise African Americans in 2012, a larger percentage of black voters than white voters turned out at the polls to assure Obama’s victory on Election Day.
2. License to Kill / David Reingold
   Without environmental regulations, many companies would gladly poison you to earn bigger profits.
3. No Junior Partner / Jess Hunter-Bowman
   Could someone please tell Secretary Kerry that Latin America is no longer our “backyard”?
4. Heritage’s Immigration Nightmare / Raul A. Reyes
   If the conservative think tank’s intent was to derail immigration reform, that’s a losing battle.
5. Uncle Sam: Please Tax the Titans / Donald Kaul
   Don’t ask me what a hedge fund is — if I knew, I’d manage one.
6. A Primer for Taming Corporate Power / Sam Pizzigati
   For social change, slow and steady may win the race.
7. Those Uninvited Guests at Your Barbecue / Jill Richardson
   With most samples of several common store-bought meats testing positive for antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” factory farming practices must change.
8. The Parched Truth About American Jobs / Jim Hightower
   The recent good news about job creation obscures the bad news facing the nation’s middle class.
9. Don’t Fence Me In / William A. Collins
   The prosperous are further isolating themselves physically, as well as economically, from the rest of us.
10. Superbugs at the Supermarket / Khalil Bendib cartoon
    

    Superbugs at the Supermarket, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

The post This Week in OtherWords: May 15, 2013 appeared first on OtherWords.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies OtherWords.org

Last summer, I predicted that the African American vote would tip the scales in the 2012 election of Barack Obama. My organization, the National Urban League, foresaw a continuation of a trend that proved to be a decisive factor in Obama’s 2008 campaign.

The Census Bureau has now confirmed our analysis. Not only did the 2012 black vote make the difference in several key swing states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the biggest prize of all, Ohio, but black voters turned out a higher rate than white voters.

Columbia City Blog

The Census Bureau found that, “About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so. This marks the first time that blacks have voted at a higher rate than whites since the Census Bureau started publishing statistics on voting by the eligible citizen population in 1996.”

Since 1996, black voter turnout rates have risen 13 percentage points, and the number of blacks who voted in 2012 rose by about 1.7 million over 2008. This is even more remarkable given that overall voting among eligible citizens declined last year.

This boost in turnout also demonstrates that, in the face of a widespread voter suppression campaign, a record number of blacks heeded the National Urban League’s call to “Occupy the Vote” — a campaign that reached 10 million people through traditional and social media, phone banking, and grassroots and community outreach. In fact, all Census divisions where voting rates of blacks exceeded those of whites included states that introduced major voter suppression tactics in the year leading up to the election.

While the National Urban League doesn’t endorse individual candidates, we do encourage civic engagement, and our affiliates have always played leading roles in voter registration drives. That’s why we are also pleased that African Americans registered in record numbers last year. The registration rate for blacks rose from 69.7 percent in 2008 to 73.1 percent in 2012 — the highest registration rate ever recorded.

In Ohio, where Obama won 96 percent of the African-American vote, the black registration rate was 74.4 percent. In North Carolina, a state he lost this time around, African-American registration increased from 71 percent in 2008 to 85 percent in 2012 with 80.2 percent of eligible black voters going to the polls, up from 68.1 percent four years ago.

The increase in black voter participation is a turning point for several reasons.

First, it’s clear that Mitt Romney would have eked out a victory in 2012 if voters had turned out at 2004 levels. White turnout was higher and black turnout was lower in that presidential election.

Second, due to an increase in overall minority voting, people of color will be wielding even more electoral clout in the coming years. According to the demographer William Frey, “by 2024, their vote will be essential to victory.”

Third, this demographic shift is prodding both major political parties to increase their outreach and appeal to minority voters and to reassess the impact their policies are having on those communities.

As the Associated Press put it, “The findings represent a tipping point for blacks, who for much of American history were disenfranchised and then effectively barred from voting until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.”

There’s no doubt that the opportunity to re-elect America’s first black president contributed to record black turnout last year. But, no matter who is on the ballot in 2014 and 2016, we must continue to exercise our voice and Occupy the Vote.

The post The Swinging Electorate appeared first on OtherWords.

Marc Morial is the president and CEO of the National Urban League and the former mayor of New Orleans. www.nul.org
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)

Well, have you ever considered what our world would look like without regulations?

In the early 20^th century, almost all paint contained lead. Despite many reports documenting the dangers of lead exposure, especially on children, the lead industry did nothing about it. Indeed, it responded by establishing an organization that countered bad publicity with campaigns like an ad depicting Santa Claus encouraging children to paint toys with lead paint. The companies also refused to put labels on their products warning parents not to paint toys and cribs with that toxic product.

matthileo/Flickr

In the 1950s, it took local and state health officials to make the case that lead paint should be banned for interior use. The lead industry fought vigorously against that ban, which we now take for granted. Without regulation, paint would still have lead in it, and our kids would still be dying and suffering from brain damage because of it.

Historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner teamed up to document this shameful tale in Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. Their book also tracks a second case of industrial foot-dragging, which involved vinyl chloride. That’s the ever-present stuff that PVC pipes, vinyl siding, and many toys are made from. The plastics industry first learned of animal studies in Italy suggesting that vinyl chloride caused cancer in 1970, but manufacturers hid this information from the public, the government, and their own workers for several years.

When the government found out, regulators proposed that the plastics industry lower the allowed level of exposure to vinyl chloride in its factories. The industry fought that logical measure, claiming that to lower exposure to the suggested levels would cost $90 billion and result in plant closings, job losses, price increases and massive economic dislocation, Markowitz and Rosner wrote. Government regulators overrode those concerns and lowered the permissible exposure level in 1975. The industry quickly found ways to comply with this new standard for less than $300 million, and none of those dire predictions came true. Those plastics manufacturers would never have done it on their own.

The stages of industrial denial are always the same:

1. X is perfectly safe.
2. Well, there’s evidence that X might cause some problems, but there’s no proof, and it could be something else.
3. OK, X is harmful, but it’s irreplaceable.
4. Well, there’s something else we could use instead, but it would be soooo expensive to change, and it would ruin our business and everyone associated with it.
5. A new product comes out that’s better and cheaper than the old one.

Whenever you hear of someone making those claims, whether it’s about fossil-fueled climate change, illness-causing fireproofing additives in furniture, pesticides suspected of making bees die off, the potentially hormone-disrupting antibacterial agents in your soap, or anything else, get skeptical.

Although there certainly are cases where chemicals suspected of being harmful ultimately prove harmless, companies almost always deny the claim that their product is dangerous.

Just remember, in a truly free market, many companies would gladly poison you to earn bigger profits. Predictions of dire consequences if we impose regulations, or benefits if we remove them, rarely come true. And anyone advocating the outright elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency, as several Republican presidential candidates did in our last election, is essentially saying they want to grant corporate America a license to kill.

The post License to Kill appeared first on OtherWords.

David Reingold, a retired chemistry professor at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)

“Just as Mexico is being transformed, so too are the ties between our two countries,” Obama said in a speech in Mexico City. “As president, I’ve been guided by a basic proposition — in this relationship there is no senior partner or junior partner. We are two equal partners — two sovereign nations that must work together in mutual interest and mutual respect.”

But this soaring rhetoric landed with a thud in the region. Most Latin Americans were still focused on Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks to Congress a couple of weeks earlier indicating that Latin America “is our backyard.”

This oft-used metaphor suggests that Latin America is a place where we can do as we please. It harkens back to the dark ages of the Monroe Doctrine and stings deeply in the region.

MarkGregory007/Flickr

Kerry’s comment brought immediate calls for an apology from Latin American leaders. Bolivia went even further, expelling the U.S. Agency for International Development from the country.

“This is the way the U.S. government thinks,” said Bolivian President Evo Morales, “that we are their backyard. We condemn and reject (this idea) and we will never again allow Bolivia or Latin America to be the U.S. government’s backyard.”

The truth is that a new relationship between Latin America and the United States is indeed being forged, but the drive is not coming from Washington. In fact, as Kerry’s slip indicates, Washington is far from interested in a partnership of equals.

Brazil’s economic emergence, China’s increasing sway in the region and, most importantly, the electoral shifts in Latin America over the past decade that brought new kinds of leaders to power have curtailed U.S. influence over the hemisphere.

And that isn’t a bad thing, especially for Latin Americans.

Consider the two most significant policy approaches Washington has taken in Latin America over the past decade: a militarized drug war and a corporate-driven free-trade model.

The militarized approach to combating drugs, from Colombia to Mexico and Central America, has proved a dismal failure with no reduction in drug production and trafficking despite billions provided to the region’s military forces. Estimates suggest 70,000 people have been killed in Mexico’s U.S.-backed drug war.

President Obama even suggested he was skeptical about a military victory in a drug war, despite continued finding in his budget, saying “I’m not interested in militarizing the struggle against drug trafficking. This is a law enforcement problem.”

He’s less conflicted when it comes to trade policy, which was front and center on his recent trip’s agenda. He reiterated his interest in expanding trade with the region and wrapping up negotiations of the NAFTA-styled Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. While such trade deals have exponentially increased trade and corporate profits, they have also undermined environmental and labor standards while devastating key sectors of local economies, such as corn farming in Mexico.

As Obama suggests, our nation’s relationship with Latin America is undergoing a transformation. Gone are the days when we could blurt out that we saw the region as our backyard without any diplomatic repercussions. Unfortunately for Washington, Latin America itself is forging this change.

The post No Junior Partner appeared first on OtherWords.

Jess Hunter-Bowman is Associate Director of Witness for Peace, a nonprofit organization with a 30-year history analyzing U.S. economic and military policy in Latin America. WitnessforPeace.org
Distributed via OtherWords. (OtherWords.org)

High school seniors in Detroit, where I grew up, had career counseling before they were turned loose on society. You took “aptitude” tests (“Would you prefer arranging flowers or building a bridge?”) and read boring brochures in the name of finding out what you wanted to be when you grew up. I took the tests and read the brochures. When I went to see Mrs. Campbell for advice, she had my records spread out in front of her.

“I think you can be just about anything you want to be,” she said. That was counselor-speak for: “You don’t have any identifiable talent.”

She reviewed the traditional professions — medicine, law, engineering, dentistry. She started on trades — machinist, carpenter, plumber, mechanic — but they seemed even more problematic.

Finally, she gathered my records into a neat pile, handed them to me and said “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

That’s how I wound up in journalism.

If only she’d mentioned the job I’ve since realized would have been a perfect fit for me — hedge fund manager.

kerim/Flickr

I say this based on what hedge fund managers get paid.

David Tepper of Appaloosa, The New York Times reports, made $2.2 billion last year. That’s what I said, folks — two billion bucks. $2,200,000,000. Poor Ray Dalio of Bridgewater trailed him by a half billion and cried all the way to his tax shelter.

Pay for the top 25 earners in the hedge fund business amounted to $14.14 billion last year. That may sound just swell, as we used to say back in high school, but it was the lowest level recorded in the past four years.

That’s my kind of racket. If I made that kind of money, I’d hire Mitt Romney to cut my lawn.

Wait, you say. Those guys made all that money because they’re smart. They must know things the rest of us don’t.

Actually, they’re not so smart. Most hedge funds — and don’t ask me what a hedge fund is, for if I knew I’d manage one — didn’t outperform the market last year. That means you could have done better putting your own cash into an index fund.

Returns for Dalio’s fund fell short of market yields, as did those for Steven A. Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors. Both titans still made out as if they’d outsmarted the markets. Cohen took home $1.4 billion.

What do you call it when you get paid a lot when you’re successful and get richly rewarded when you fail? Capitalism.

I’m OK with that. I say let them make as much money as their greed requires — then tax the hell out of them to get a little back for society.

The 60 percent of us who belong to the middle class are shelling out 22-30 percent of our income to various governments when we pay taxes. I’ll guarantee you that none of these guys pay anything near that.

Take the payroll tax, for example. The bottom 80 percent of earners pay 7.65 percent of their income in FICA taxes. But the hedge fund managers listed above don’t pay standard payroll taxes on any of their income over the first measly $113,000 in income officially designated as wages. And a perk known as the “carried interest” provision ensures that most of their income from doing whatever it is that they do is taxed at the capital gains rate — which is about half the rate applied to the income of other professions.

These are the people our Republicans in Congress are shielding from tax increases while seeking to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And yes, Congress did agree on a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income as part of the Affordable Care Act. But no, it’s not likely to increase the tax burden on gazillionaires.

Is this a great country or what?

Mrs. Campbell, you were my guidance counselor. You shoulda guided me a little better. I coulda been somebody; I coulda been a contender.

I coulda been a hedge fund manager.

The post Uncle Sam: Please Tax the Titans appeared first on OtherWords.

OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org

Too harsh a judgment? Hardly. Current standard corporate operating procedures only make sense if we acknowledge that American Big Business has essentially become the private preserve of an elite executive class.

Chelsea Green Publishing

How else to explain today’s most routine corporate behaviors? The endless rush to mergers that create little more than workplace chaos. The ongoing refusal to invest significantly in research and development and employee training. The billions of dollars spent to “buy back” company shares of stock.

All these moves leave corporations less equipped to succeed in the long term. But all these moves generate multiple millions, in the here and now, for the corporate executives who make them.

Corporations, of course, have always done well by the executives who run them. But a half-century ago we had institutions that kept this enrichment in check. Unions acted as a brake on executive greed grabs. A progressive tax system — with rates as high as 91 percent on income over $400,000 — discouraged the greed grabbing in the first place.

But both these institutions — unions and progressive taxes — have atrophied over recent decades. We’ve slid into what University of Maryland political economist Gar Alperovitz calls a “systemic crisis.” For most Americans, daily life has become an ever-faster treadmill. And no real relief looms on the near horizon.

In this dreary environment, disillusionment with our political leaders rises year by year. So does cynicism. Why bother struggling against an unjust status quo when nothing ever changes?

Alperovitz has a new book out that aims to rouse us from this suffocating political stupor. In What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution, he endeavors to show that societies in “systemic crisis” can change. Revolutions do happen. Indeed, he suggests, “we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution.”

In any social order, Alperovitz explains, political power reflects the ongoing distribution of wealth. Meaningful change only begins when that existing distribution starts coming under challenge.

Alperovitz sees the challenge needed today as much more than any single campaign for a candidate or cause. He has something deeper in mind: an “evolutionary reconstruction” of our society, a decades-long shift that aims to democratize wealth, to build “a community-sustaining economy from the ground up.”

Pie-in-the-sky fantasy? We already, notes Alperovitz, have the seeds of an alternate, wealth-democratizing economy in place. Well over 100 million Americans belong to credit unions and co-ops. Ten million Americans labor in worker-owned enterprises. Millions more live in municipalities where public institutions generate electric power — or even provide Internet service.

Alperovitz envisions a steady expansion of wealth-democratizing institutions like these. Over time, the people these institutions touch begin to see from their daily experiences that alternatives to our dominant corporate status quo do exist. They begin to hold “clear ideas” about what can be done.

In times of acute crisis — say another banking failure — people with these clear ideas about democratizing wealth won’t let their tax dollars bail out billionaires. They’ll demand public banks. They’ll carve away at private corporate power, bit by bit.

What Then Must We Do? mixes these intoxicating visions of a future yet to be with concrete descriptions of wealth-democratizing efforts already underway, from Cleveland and Chattanooga to Portland and Sacramento.

America, Alperovitz reminds us, has become the world’s wealthiest nation. Our annual income, if divided equally, would be enough to bring each family of four $200,000. We can, in other words, do far better for average Americans than we do today. Why not try?

The post A Primer for Taming Corporate Power appeared first on OtherWords.

OtherWords columnist Sam Pizzigati is an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. His latest book is The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class. OtherWords.org

For now, you’d better cook your meat well enough to kill the germs (165F is the magic temperature), but there might be hope for safer alternatives in the future. Consumer advocates and lawmakers are trying to push changes that make these superbugs a thing of the past. That’s never been so important because industrialized agriculture delivers efficiency, productivity, and profit at the expense of food safety.

Our modern-day factory farm system has for too long served up meat that too frequently comes with a side of with pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli. Packing animals into cages and pens and feeding them the cheapest possible diets results in fast growth and tidy profits. But it also sets up sanitary conditions worse than a medieval city. With so many immune-depressed animals packed tightly together (along with their waste), these “farms” are a boon for bacteria.

That’s bad enough because food poisoning can kill you. But the news is even worse because many of the pathogens found in meat aren’t just bugs — they’re superbugs. If they infect you, antibiotics won’t help.

Superbugs at the Supermarket, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

This isn’t an abstract public-health risk. You know how your doctor warns you to take that entire course of prescribed antibiotics even if your symptoms go away? That standard precaution helps ensure that the bacteria making you ill can’t evolve resistance to your antibiotics. The goal is to slam them with such a heavy dose for such a sustained period of time that even the strongest bacteria die off. But why are we so careful about antibiotic use in humans while our agricultural system is practically designed to create superbugs?

Today, a full 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in this country are given to the animals we eat — even when they aren’t sick. Why? Profits.

In theory, constant low doses of antibiotics help prevent illnesses in livestock. But the antibiotics serve another purpose too: They make cattle, chickens, pigs, and other farm animals grow faster. This arrangement yields a bounty of superbugs because the bacteria that are most susceptible to the antibiotics die while the resistant ones survive and pass on their genes.

If harmful bacteria evolve resistance to the antibiotics we rely on to kill them, we’ll be up a creek without a paddle. Getting food poisoning is lousy enough, but imagine if the antibiotics your doctor prescribes don’t work.

In April, the Environmental Working Group drew attention to the previously under-reported findings of federal-government researchers who found that most samples of several common store-bought meats tested contained superbugs. They detected antibiotic-resistant bacteria in 81 percent of the ground turkey, 69 percent of the pork chops, 55 percent of the ground beef, and 39 percent of the chicken parts sold at our supermarkets.

Those numbers are no fluke. Consumer Reports recently tested ground turkey too. Its researches found harmful bacteria in 90 percent of samples. And most of these pathogens were resistant to one or more antibiotics. Even organic ground turkey had alarming bacteria levels, although it was less likely to contain superbugs.

Scientists first found that feeding animals antibiotics when they aren’t sick generates superbugs four decades ago, but we still haven’t changed how we produce meat.

As bad as that is, do you know what’s even scarier? The industry’s weak standards. Under our current regulations, a turkey plant passes safety inspections if less than half of the ground turkey samples tested are contaminated with salmonella.

What’s the fix? Rep. Louise Slaughter, the sole microbiologist in Congress, has been trying since 2007 to ban the use of antibiotics that are important in human medicine for healthy farm animals. The New York Democrat’s legislation wouldn’t solve every problem with our factory farms. But at least it would do something to fight the spread of superbugs.

That’s good, but it’s a band-aid. The real answer lies in an end to the kind of farming that kills livestock and poultry before they head to the slaughterhouse.

The post Those Uninvited Guests at Your Barbecue appeared first on OtherWords.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org

“Jobs Spring Back,” exclaimed a typical headline on recent reports that 165,000 private-sector jobs were added in April. Wow — the thunderous, three-year boom of prosperity that has rained riches on Wall Street is finally beginning to shower on our streets, right?

Well, as dry-land farmers can tell you: Thunder ain’t rain. Read beneath the joyful headlines and you’ll see the parched truth.

Lynn Friedman/Flickr

For example, more than a third of working-age Americans are either out of work or have given up on finding a job. Also, last month’s hiring increase was almost entirely for receptionists, waiters, temp workers, car-rental agents, and other low-wage positions. Plus, manufacturing, generally the source of good, middle-class jobs, didn’t add workers in April, when the unemployment rate inched back to 7.5 percent.

Especially problematic was the continued rise in underemployment — people wanting full-time work, but having to take part-time and temporary jobs. Underemployment is also pounding college graduates. While they’ve been more successful than non-grads at landing jobs, they’re not getting jobs that fit their career goals or even require the degrees they spent money and time to obtain.

Indeed, many of those rental agents and restaurant employees you encounter hold four-year degrees, forcing everyone else to scramble for the few, even lower-paid jobs farther down the skill ladder. Meanwhile, the next graduating class is about to flood into the labor market with nowhere to go.

America’s middle class is in a crisis, while our pathetic political leaders pretend Wall Street’s prosperity covers us all — and the corporate media puts little happy-face stickers over the dark reality faced by the workaday majority.

The post The Parched Truth About American Jobs appeared first on OtherWords.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org

Many folks with big incomes are responding to the tensions of America’s growing economic inequality by moving into gated communities. This isn’t new, just growing more common. Ten percent of us are already gated in one way or another.

The recession has added further impetus to the nation’s housing challenges both inside and outside those gates. Foreclosures aren’t as common as they were a few years ago when the housing bubble burst, but they’re still converting more homeowners into renters. And the dwindling of the middle class keeps countless emerging young adults from ever gaining their own place.

Veterans, whom we once supported with yellow magnets, are frequently the worst off. The overall veteran homelessness rate declined last year, but the rate for Iraq and Afghanistan vets doubled between 2010 and 2012. Those former troops — many of whom returned with fearsome disabilities — are too often homeless and hopeless with no avenue into the commercial housing market

And commercial is exactly what our housing market has become. It aims mostly at upper-income buyers these days, since that’s where the money is. The old mass housing market that blossomed during the middle class’s 20^th-century heyday is but a distant memory.

woodleywonderworks/Flickr

Federal housing subsidies, meanwhile, also smile more warmly upon the rich. The federal government spends more on housing programs that benefit households earning $100,000 or more per year than on people who make less than that — and presumably are the ones who really need help. That includes $35 billion right off the top that goes to families with over $200,000 in income just for their mortgage interest tax deduction. Renters need not apply.

The result of these various trends is that the prosperous are further isolating themselves physically, as well as economically, from the rest of us. And as more and more people lose their homes or fail to transition from renting to owning, they’re building up less equity. That will haunt them in later life when the chasm between haves and have-nots will continue to widen unless we change course.

The post Don’t Fence Me In appeared first on OtherWords.

OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org

The post Superbugs at the Supermarket appeared first on OtherWords.

Khalil Bendib is OtherWords' cartoonist. OtherWords.org