the truth is im not sure if any other towns with ivy leagues in them tend to have the hatred and resentment for the school that ppl from new haven often have for yale. id love to just sit down and chat with someone from another ivy league town bc like. is it just the combo of a school full of very rich prep school kids in one of the poorest areas in the state where our public schools literally does not have the funding or curriculum for a lot of students to qualify for the college in their own fucking town or is this a wider issue in other places

Todd Gloria wants to be the first LGBTQ person elected mayor of San Diego

San Diego mayoral candidate Todd Gloria (D) believes being gay made him into the politician he is today.

A third generation San Diegan, the California State Assemblymember came out when he was still a teenager in the 1990s. In both high school and college, he experienced extensive bullying due to his sexuality.

Related: San Diego drag queen club owner beaten while being called anti-gay slur

And so, in hopes of making up for what society continued to tell him was a “deficit,” he fought harder to achieve his goals.

“That’s really where I found my voice as an activist,” he told LGBTQ Nation.

While attending college at the University of San Diego, Gloria successfully led the effort to get sexual orientation added to the campus nondiscrimination policy.

Through that experience, he said, he learned valuable political skills.

“I have a dear friend who likes to say that gay is a superpower,” Gloria said, “And that really resonates for me. I really found my way to being able to put myself out of my comfort zone, not just for me, but for other people. I hope to do that every day as mayor.”

If elected, Gloria will be the first LGBTQ person elected mayor of San Diego, as well the first person of color. He was appointed interim mayor with limited powers in 2013, a position he held until current Mayor Kevin Faulconer (R) was sworn in.

“This would be a significant barrier broken,” he said. “As a kid who grew up in this community looking for role models… I think this would send a really strong message to young people in our city today about what is possible.”

Gloria has emerged as a frontrunner in the race and has racked up an impressive number of endorsements, including the San Diego County Democratic Party, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and the LGBTQ Victory Fund.

“It is Todd’s lived experience as an openly gay man and a person of color that will shape his inclusive and values-driven approach to tackling those big issues,” wrote Victory Fund President and CEO, Mayor Annise Parker, in a statement, “and as mayor he will ensure that no residents are left behind.”

Gloria has a long list of accomplishments when it comes to helping LGBTQ San Diegans. He served on the City Council for eight years representing the third district, which is home to the city’s LGBTQ neighborhood.

During that time, he spearheaded the passing of an Equal Benefits Ordinance that ensured contractors provided the same benefits to LGBTQ couples that they did to other couples.

Additionally, he helped establish the city’s first affordable housing complex for LGBTQ senior citizens.

He also worked on the “Getting to Zero” initiative, which established a ten-year goal to eradicate HIV and AIDS from San Diego.

“Representation matters,” he said. “If you’re in that room, you can bring up these issues that often aren’t discussed.”

Gloria is currently Vice Chair of the California Legislature’s largest ever LGBTQ caucus, where he has continued to fight for the LGBTQ community.

In 2019, for example, he worked with State Sen. Scott Wiener (D) to pass the first legislation in the country that allows pharmacies to sell the HIV prevention and treatment medications, PrEP and PEP over the counter.

Gloria’s focus on HIV advocacy, he said, comes in part from “knowing that many of the men who could have served and should have served didn’t because HIV and AIDS happened and took out a whole generation of leaders. I carry that responsibility on my shoulders.”

In 2013, Gloria was appointed interim mayor of San Diego after then Mayor Bob Filner (D) resigned over sexual harassment allegations.

During this time, he created San Diego’s Climate Action Plan that established a goal of cutting the city’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2035. A version of this plan was then enacted by current Mayor Faulconer.

As mayor, Gloria plans to focus on improving transportation, infrastructure, housing affordability, and homelessness.

Solving the homelessness crisis is a top priority, he said, as San Diego has the 5th largest homeless population in the country.

“Our strategy will be focused on permanent supportive housing instead of temporary shelters,” his website reads. “Our goal should be to end chronic homelessness… No more band-aids. No more temporary tents without a plan. No more criminalizing the existence of San Diego’s poorest and sickest residents.”

Gloria has received widespread support for his track record of success, but he also became the subject of a recent lawsuit regarding his admitted violation of the California Political Reform Act.

He has been accused of misfiling paperwork as a way to launder money into his mayoral campaign. Gloria insists it was a simple clerical error, one his campaign reported immediately after realizing the mistake.

San Diego resident Mat Wahlstrom sued Gloria over the matter and contended he shouldn’t be able to use certain funds raised for his mayoral race. The judge sided with Gloria.

he paid a $200 fine for the paperwork mistake, though he said Wahlstrom has recently filed another complaint against him.

“His allegations are baseless,” Gloria said. “Courts have not ruled in his favor, but he’s going to continue to push, as is his right in our democracy, but I hope folks can see it for what it is, which is a simple paperwork error and nothing more than that. Authorities involved in the situation have closed the case.”

The Advocate noted that Wahlstrom has also been a vocal critic on some neighborhood development projects that Gloria has supported in the city’s LGBTQ neighborhood.

Above all else, Gloria wants San Diego residents to know that he is deeply invested in improving San Diego for all residents. “I’ve spent my entire life serving my community, he said, “and I do it as someone who understands just how hard people work to live in this city, and that’s a perspective I’ve never lost.”

The son of a maid and a gardener, Gloria said he knows what it feels like to not be able to afford a car and struggle through the San Diego transportation system.

He also knows what it’s like to worry about making rent. In fact, he is still a renter today, the only renter, he said, in the entire California legislature.

“[San Diegans] should have someone in the mayor’s office who understands what they’re going through,” he said. “And have an advocate who is really going to make their lives better.”

How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures

The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

In statements, the Red Cross cited the challenges all groups have faced in post-quake Haiti, including the country’s dysfunctional land title system.

“Like many humanitarian organizations responding in Haiti, the American Red Cross met complications in relation to government coordination delays, disputes over land ownership, delays at Haitian customs, challenges finding qualified staff who were in short supply and high demand, and the cholera outbreak, among other challenges,” the charity said.

The group said it responded quickly to internal concerns, including hiring an expert to train staff on cultural competency after St. Fort’s memo. While the group won’t provide a breakdown of its projects, the Red Cross said it has done more than 100. The projects include repairing 4,000 homes, giving several thousand families temporary shelters, donating $44 million for food after the earthquake, and helping fund the construction of a hospital.

“Millions of Haitians are safer, healthier, more resilient, and better prepared for future disasters thanks to generous donations to the American Red Cross,” McGovern wrote in a recent report marking the fifth anniversary of the earthquake.

In other promotional materials, the Red Cross said it has helped “more than 4.5 million” individual Haitians “get back on their feet.”

It has not provided details to back up the claim. And Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake, doubts the figure, pointing out the country’s entire population is only about 10 million.

“No, no,” Bellerive said of the Red Cross’ claim, “it’s not possible.”

When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, the Red Cross was facing a crisis of its own. McGovern had become chief executive just 18 months earlier, inheriting a deficit and an organization that had faced scandals after 9/11 and Katrina.

Inside the Red Cross, the Haiti disaster was seen as “a spectacular fundraising opportunity,” recalled one former official who helped organize the effort. Michelle Obama, the NFL and a long list of celebrities appealed for donations to the group.

The Red Cross kept soliciting money well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group’s stock in trade. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising off the earthquake after it decided it had enough money. The donations to the Red Cross helped the group erase its more-than $100 million deficit.

The Red Cross ultimately raised far more than any other charity.

A year after the quake, McGovern announced that the Red Cross would use the donations to make a lasting impact in Haiti.

We asked the Red Cross to show us around its projects in Haiti so we could see the results of its work. It declined. So earlier this year we went to Campeche to see one of the group’s signature projects for ourselves.

Street vendors in the dusty neighborhood immediately pointed us to Jean Jean Flaubert, the head of a community group that the Red Cross set up as a local sounding board.

Sitting with us in their sparse one-room office, Flaubert and his colleagues grew angry talking about the Red Cross. They pointed to the lack of progress in the neighborhood and the healthy salaries paid to expatriate aid workers.

“What the Red Cross told us is that they are coming here to change Campeche. Totally change it,” said Flaubert. “Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about. I think the Red Cross is working for themselves.”

The Red Cross’ initial plan said the focus would be building homes — an internal proposal put the number at 700. Each would have finished floors, toilets, showers, even rainwater collection systems. The houses were supposed to be finished in January 2013.

None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project’s manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross “didn’t have the know-how.”

Another former official who worked on the Campeche project said, “Everything takes four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”

Shown an English-language press release from the Red Cross website, Flaubert was stunned to learn of the project’s $24 million budget — and that it is due to end next year.

“Not only is [the Red Cross] not doing it,” Flaubert said, “now I’m learning that the Red Cross is leaving next year. I don’t understand that.” (The Red Cross says it did tell community leaders about the end date. It also accused us of “creating ill will in the community which may give rise to a security incident.”)

The project has since been reshaped and downscaled. A road is being built. Some existing homes have received earthquake reinforcement and a few schools are being repaired. Some solar street lights have been installed, though many broke and residents say others are unreliable.

The group’s most recent press release on the project cites achievements such as training school children in disaster response.

The Red Cross said it has to scale back its housing plans because it couldn’t acquire the rights to land. No homes will be built.

Other Red Cross infrastructure projects also fizzled.

In January 2011, McGovern announced a $30 million partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency would build roads and other infrastructure in at least two locations where the Red Cross would build new homes.

But it took more than two and a half years, until August 2013, for the Red Cross just to sign an agreement with USAID on the program, and even that was for only one site. The program was ultimately canceled because of a land dispute.

A Government Accountability Office report attributed the severe delays to problems “in securing land title and because of turnover in Red Cross leadership” in its Haiti program.

Other groups also ran into trouble with land titles and other issues. But they also ultimately built 9,000 homes compared to the Red Cross’ six.

Asked about the Red Cross’ housing projects in Haiti, David Meltzer, the group’s general counsel and chief international officer, said changing conditions forced changes in plans. “If we had said, ‘All we’re going to do is build new homes,’ we’d still be looking for land,” he said.

The USAID project’s collapse left the Red Cross grasping for ways to spend money earmarked for it.

“Any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?? (Besides the wonderful helicopter idea?),” McGovern wrote to Meltzer in a November 2013 email obtained by ProPublica and NPR. “Can we fund Conrad’s hospital? Or more to PiH[Partners in Health]? Any more shelter projects?”

It’s not clear what helicopter idea McGovern was referring to or if it was ever carried out. The Red Cross would say only that her comments were “grounded in the American Red Cross’ strategy and priorities, which focus on health and housing.”

Another signature project, known in Creole as “A More Resilient Great North,” is supposed to rehabilitate roads in poor, rural communities and to help them get clean water and sanitation.

But two years after it started, the $13 million effort has been faltering badly. An internal evaluation from March found residents were upset because nothing had been done to improve water access or infrastructure or to make “contributions of any sort to the well being of households,” the report said.

So much bad feeling built up in one area that the population “rejects the project.”

Instead of making concrete improvements to living conditions, the Red Cross has launched hand-washing education campaigns. The internal evaluation noted that these were “not effective when people had no access to water and no soap.” (The Red Cross declined to comment on the project.)

The group’s failures went beyond just infrastructure.

When a cholera epidemic raged through Haiti nine months after the quake, the biggest part of the Red Cross’ response — a plan to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was crippled by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” wrote the director of the Haiti program in her May 2011 memo.

Throughout that year, cholera was a steady killer. By September 2011, when the death toll had surpassed 6,000, the project was still listed as “very behind schedule” according to another internal document.

The Red Cross said in a statement that its cholera response, including a vaccination campaign, has continued for years and helped millions of Haitians.

But while other groups also struggled early responding to cholera, some performed well.

“None of these people had to die. That’s what upsets me,” said Paul Christian Namphy, a Haitian water and sanitation official who helped lead the effort to fight cholera. He says early failures by the Red Cross and other NGOs had a devastating impact. “These numbers should have been zero.”

***

So why did the Red Cross’ efforts fall so short? It wasn’t just that Haiti is a hard place to work.

“They collected nearly half a billion dollars,” said a congressional staffer who helped oversee Haiti reconstruction. “But they had a problem. And the problem was that they had absolutely no expertise.”

Lee Malany was in charge of the Red Cross’ shelter program in Haiti starting in 2010. He remembers a meeting in Washington that fall where officials did not seem to have any idea how to spend millions of dollars set aside for housing. Malany says the officials wanted to know which projects would generate good publicity, not which projects would provide the most homes.

“When I walked out of that meeting I looked at the people that I was working with and said, ‘You know this is very disconcerting, this is depressing,’” he recalled.

The Red Cross said in a statement its Haiti program has never put publicity over delivering aid.

Malany resigned the next year from his job in Haiti. “I said there’s no reason for me to stay here. I got on the plane and left.”

Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of expertise, but whether anybody was filling key jobs. An April 2012 organizational chart obtained by ProPublica and NPR lists 9 of 30 leadership positions in Haiti as vacant, including slots for experts on health and shelter.

The Red Cross said vacancies and turnover were inevitable because of “the security situation, separation from family for international staff, and the demanding nature of the work.”

The constant upheaval took a toll. Internal documents refer to repeated attempts over years to “finalize” and “complete” a strategic plan for the Haiti program, efforts that were delayed by changes in senior management. As late as March 2014, more than four years into a six-year program, an internal update cites a “revised strategy” still awaiting “final sign-off.”

The Red Cross said settling on a plan early would have been a mistake. “It would be hard to create the perfect plan from the beginning in a complicated place like Haiti,” it said. “But we also need to begin, so we create plans that are continually revised.”

Those plans were further undermined by the Red Cross’ reliance on expats. Noailles, the Haitian development professional who worked for the Red Cross on the Campeche project, said expat staffers struggled in meetings with local officials.

“Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” she said. Sometimes, she recalled, expat staffers would skip such meetings altogether.

The Red Cross said it has “made it a priority to hire Haitians” despite lots of competition for local professionals, and that over 90 percent of its staff is Haitian. The charity said it used a local human resources firm to help.

Yet very few Haitians have made it into the group’s top echelons in Haiti, according to five current and former Red Cross staffers as well as staff lists obtained by ProPublica and NPR.

That not only affected the group’s ability to work in Haiti, it was also expensive.

According to an internal Red Cross budgeting document for the project in Campeche, the project manager – a position reserved for an expatriate – was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation expenses. In all, it added up to $140,000.

Compensation for a senior Haitian engineer — the top local position — was less than one-third of that, $42,000 a year.

Shelim Dorval, a Haitian administrator who worked for the Red Cross coordinating travel and housing for expatriate staffers, recalled thinking it was a waste to spend so much to bring in people with little knowledge of Haiti when locals were available.

“For each one of those expats, they were having high salaries, staying in a fancy house, and getting vacation trips back to their countries,” Dorval said. “A lot of money was spent on those people who were not Haitian, who had nothing to do with Haiti. The money was just going back to the United States.”

***

Soon after the earthquake, McGovern, the Red Cross CEO, said the group would make sure donors knew exactly what happened to their money.

The Red Cross would “lead the effort in transparency,” she pledged. “We are happy to share the way we are spending our dollars.”

That hasn’t happened. The Red Cross’ public reports offer only broad categories about where $488 million in donations has gone. The biggest category is shelter, at about $170 million. The others include health, emergency relief and disaster preparedness.

It has declined repeated requests to disclose the specific projects, to explain how much money went to each or to say what the results of each project were.

There is reason to doubt the Red Cross’ claims that it helped 4.5 million Haitians. An internal evaluation found that in some areas, the Red Cross reported helping more people than even lived in the communities. In other cases, the figures were low, and in others double-counting went uncorrected.

In describing its work, the Red Cross also conflates different types of aid, making it more difficult to assess the charity’s efforts in Haiti.

For example, while the Red Cross says it provided more than 130,000 people with homes, that includes thousands of people who were not actually given homes, but rather were “trained in proper construction techniques.” (That was first reported by the Haiti blog of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)

The figure includes people who got short-term rental assistance or were housed in several thousand “transitional shelters,” which are temporary structures that can get eaten up by termites or tip over in storms. It also includes modest improvements on 5,000 temporary shelters.

The Red Cross also won’t break down what portion of donations went to overhead.

McGovern told CBS News a few months after the quake, “Minus the 9 cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar will be going to Haiti. And I give you my word and my commitment, I’m banking my integrity, my own personal sense of integrity on that statement.”

But the reality is that less money went to Haiti than 91 percent. That’s because in addition to the Red Cross’ 9 percent overhead, the other groups that got grants from the Red Cross also have their own overhead.

In one case, the Red Cross sent $6 million to the International Federation of the Red Cross for rental subsidies to help Haitians leave tent camps. The IFRC then took out 26 percent for overhead and what the IFRC described as program-related “administration, finance, human resources” and similar costs.

Beyond all that, the Red Cross also spends another piece of each dollar for what it describes as “program costs incurred by the American Red Cross in managing” the projects done by other groups.

The American Red Cross’ management and other costs consumed an additional 24 percent of the money on one project, according to the group’s statements and internal documents. The actual work, upgrading shelters, was done by the Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies.

“It’s a cycle of overhead,” said Jonathan Katz, the Associated Press reporter in Haiti at the time of the earthquake who tracked post-disaster spending for his book, The Big Truck That Went By. “It was always going to be the American Red Cross taking a 9 percent cut, re-granting to another group, which would take out their cut.”

Given the results produced by the Red Cross’ projects in Haiti, Bellerive, the former prime minister, said he has a hard time fathoming what’s happened to donors’ money.

“Five hundred million dollars in Haiti is a lot of money,” he said. “I’m not a big mathematician, but I can make some additions. I know more or less the cost of things. Unless you don’t pay for the gasoline the same price I was paying, unless you pay people 20 times what I was paying them, unless the cost of the house you built was five times the cost I was paying, it doesn’t add up for me.”

[fmr]

Photographs:

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The Red Cross promised to build hundreds of new homes in Campeche but none have been built. Many residents still live in crude shacks.

Jean Jean Flaubert says the Red Cross promised to transform his neighborhood. “Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about,” he said

Transitional shelters like these on the outskirts of Port-Au-Prince, paid for by the Red Cross, typically last three to five years

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

A resident in a Port-Au-Prince transitional shelter paid for by the Red Cross

The UK is such a mess.

Poverty, homelessness, fewer jobs for un/low-skilled workers, kids starving, old people dying, more kids in care, Brexit, adult social care and the NHS!

Parents struggling financially face many problems, not least of all potentially and unintentionally placing additional stress on children. Kids growing up poor understand that no-one knows where the next meal is coming from, or if the electricity will stay on, or if they’ll get lunch during the summer holidays. Not to mention there is no money for extra-curricular activities, day trips out or even a new football to kick around in order to stay out of trouble. (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/dec/02/growing-up-poor-britains-breadline-kids-review-the-lives-stolen-by-poverty)

Too many children live in temporary accommodation, often sharing one room with siblings and parents. They are expected to focus at school, whilst teachers apply pressure to “perform” like monkeys - sit this test, pass that exam, all so the school can justify itself and draw down funding. Our children are more stressed than ever and we’re raising a generation filled with mental and physical illnesses and conditions that a few decades ago hadn’t even been heard of! “The most recent quarterly statistics recorded 84,740 households in temporary accommodation at the end of March 2019. This represents a 77% increase since December 2010, where the use of temporary accommodation hit its lowest point since 2004″ (https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN02110).

Countless parents struggling with with finance, work, housing, accessing support, healthcare and more, may also be suffering with mental/physical health conditions; and therefore, the whole family suffers. And before anyone gets on my case about people on benefits, most of the 4.1 million children living in poverty have at least one parent working! We've created a whole new 'class' of people in the UK in recent years - the "working poor" (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/04/four-million-british-workers-live-in-poverty-charity-says).

However, companies want their profits and too many large corporations make millions, if not billions every year, whilst desperate people cling to work, hoping their child isn’t sent home sick from school, praying their car makes it on the little bit of fuel they’ve just put in; and plugging away for hours on end without any food because there is nothing in the cupboard to make up a packed-lunch and their kids are receiving free school meals because there’s just no other choice.

There are no council houses, social housing is a joke (waiting lists approx. 7-10yrs) in some local authority areas, and private rents are through the roof. Our NHS is slashing services, and closing clinics and local hospitals, which reduces the provision to those most in need; including mental health teams and adult social care (https://nhsfunding.info/symptoms/10-effects-of-underfunding/cuts-to-frontline-services/).

However, children’s Social Services appear to doing just fine in the sense that they’re busy enough accusing parents of abuse and/or neglect, simply because they’re battling ‘life’ on a daily basis. They’re very quick to remove children from ‘good enough’ parents, fast-track the paperwork to court and apply for removal orders left right and centre; leading to private Fostering and Adoption agencies cashing in! This video highlights just some of the issues with Social Services and the system as a whole: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7TcFWqKja8).

Trying to 'survive' creates stress, which has many wide-reaching physical and mental implications; from hormone imbalance, metabolic disorders and weight gain, to fatigue and eating problems. Many parents do go without so that their kids can eat, yet they still gain weight and lose energy, feeling exhausted every day, simply due to the stress they're under. Choosing between heating and eating creates health issues, with malnutrition identified in the 5th richest nation in the world and the elderly dying of being unable to afford the gas fire (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cold-weather-uk-winter-deaths-europe-polar-vortex-a8224276.html).

The Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn, aim to privatise energy, water, rail and the postal service, as well as some other utilities and services; however, they need to go one or two steps further. The NHS offer should extend to in-home care and the running and regulation of care homes (with those who can afford to pay, doing so) and the government should regain control of children’s services, with private fostering and adoption companies being take out of existence (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/23/revealed-companies-running-inadequate-uk-care-homes-make-113m-profit).

Unless something changes on a national scale, with a new government and new direction, the mental health crisis is only going to get worse, along with other social problems such as excessive drinking and drug-taking (used as a form of escape), increased crime rates and gang membership, and anti-social behaviour (often due to boredom), etc. Parenting hasn’t become worse, people are fighting to survive! Nurses are going to food banks, fire fighters work second jobs; Police recruits are low caliber due to the starting pay offered and standards being lowered during recruitment drives. Teachers are watching kids fall asleep in class because they’re not eating and sleeping properly.

You only need to take a look at some news headlines to realise just how out of control everything is. On top of the national political and socio-economic issues facing the UK, privateers are pressing on with a needless and expensive high-speed rail network - HS2 is now an £88 BILLION pound project! Imagine what could be done with all that money (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/03/hs2-to-be-delayed-by-up-to-five-years). It would certainly solve a few problems.

So whilst business commuters might, eventually, be able to arrive at their destination 30mins earlier than before, the general population is duct-taping their shoes together and sewing holes in socks, just so they can go to work to earn enough to barely keep a roof over their head and food on the table, and the big businesses just keep getting richer (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/dec/03/uk-six-richest-people-control-as-much-wealth-as-poorest-13m-study).

And what about the planet? Are poor people really interested in recycling, sustainable living and providing a nurturing garden habitat to attract wildlife (for those lucky enough to have access to a garden of course)? Some might be, but in the main, people are overworked, underpaid, stressed beyond belief, exhausted and trying not to yell at the kids or argue with their partner because everyone feels the same and is rubbing each other up the wrong way.

The UK desperately needs radical change. Never mind the disaster that is Brexit, the more urgent issue is “survival”. Charities, foodbanks and the like help, but they should even need to exist. There is more than enough money, food and water to go round; it’s simply a case of sharing the wealth.

Controlled procreation should also be on the agenda. Not the systematic theft of children by Social Services, ‘upcycling’ kids to ‘better’ families to reduce the number of underclass and bring down the welfare bill. But the responsible, educated, proactive approach from people choosing to have children. Ideally, a couple would stay together and have up to 2 children, live in a safe, warm and comfortable home, raise them well and encourage them to do the same. However, many are choosing to have 3 or 4 children, and in some countries many more, and the planet is overpopulated. Yes there are issues around adult separation and rape case where the pregnancy isn’t terminated, but this focuses on more general planned parenthood.

Birth control and education must be provided worldwide and the relevant support provided to parents who need help - often, it’s simply a little guidance or support, but instead, in the UK they’re often faced with meetings, court appearances and parenting assessments, as they are accused of not being able to cope. As a human race, there is a responsibility not to over-produce more humans! Earth is running out of resources and the air and water is becoming more polluted. Eventually, people will be hunting each other and fighting over scraps because everything else is gone. Millions will have died off through dehydration or starvation. Medical services won’t be available. Money will not longer be of value - unless of course you can digest it to gain a few dollars worth of energy.

Also, we’re so intent on living longer, curing disease and holding onto pregnancies which otherwise would have self-terminated; yet we’re overrunning the planet with more and more elderly, sick, disabled humans needing to be cared for. We’re creating more problems than we’re solving and we’re not being responsible. We all want to keep loved ones close, but can we afford their care, or do we have somewhere to place them until they finally pass? Of course Cancer is a multi-billion-pound industry and therefore, sick people equals profit for big pharma. China had a one-child policy which created many issues for a long time, however, they reduced their population and increased it to 2 only as recently as 2016 (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2214179-chinas-two-child-policy-linked-to-5-million-extra-babies-in-18-months/).

There is no easy answer. Low-skilled jobs are replaced by self-serve checkouts, Universal Credit has plunged thousands of people into unnecessary debt, the rising cost of living is not reflected in wages, people are living in unsafe properties because they have nowhere else to go and others perish in fires due to inadequate building regulations - 2yrs on from Grenfell and still no changes have been made (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/fires-grenfell-towers-combustible-cladding).

The poor simply don’t matter and currently, there are too many of us for the government’s liking, so it’s doing it’s best to kill us off. It’s a Social Cleansing agenda which serves the richest, most powerful in society. Many of us will live on, clinging to work, hoping for a brighter day; all the while putting more money into the off-shore bank accounts of the elite from which they buy their yachts and private jets, champagne, cocaine and pretty boys and girls to play with (https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/anneke-lucass-harrowing-tale-of-sex-trafficking-am/).

This world is SICK and getting sicker. We’re hoping for change. We’re hoping for a UK Labour government and for Donald Trump to be removed from the White House - that would be a good start. We’re then hoping to cascade the transformation around the world, to lead by example and have the 1% share the wealth they have accumulated through the enslavement of the general population - starting with paying Tax.

If you truly care about your future and that of your children, take action:

- vote Labour on 12th December 2019.

- vote for a decent POTUS candidate.

- boycott big pharma and big corporations - buy local, reuse, recyle and repurpose. Use repair cafes and similar to swap, make good or otherwise utilise products which already exist instead of buying new.

- help your neighbour - buy in bulk, cook and eat together to reduce costs and waste, plant your own food, eat less meat/become vegan. Cook in bulk and freeze meals for another day.

- responsibility manage household energy consumption and look for solar/wind options.

- carefully plan and be responsible for just one or two children, lessening the load on this planet and your bank balance.

- be happy with what you have - go charity-shop shopping instead of buying new; move things around or swap rooms about instead of redecorating every couple of years. If you cannot sell an unwanted item, give it away, don’t bin it.

- stop going mad at Christmas and reduce down what you buy for Easter, Halloween and other occasions. Wrap your gifts in newspaper or recyclable materials.

- use metal or glass water bottles and refill instead of buying plastic all the time.

- understand the law! You never know when you might be fighting a battle with the powers that be - become your own detective and your own legal team. From employment law to the Children Act 2004, familiarise yourself. Legislation touches EVERY part of our lives, from driving to renting a house, and from buying food to taking out a mobile phone contract. You need to know how to protect yourself every step of the way. The authorities (currently) are NOT on your side, so make sure you’ve got your own back!

African Governments Are Paying for the World Bank’s Mauritius Miracle

Published: Foreign Policy (18 October 2018) w/ Claire Provost

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius—The security guard at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address at an office at the St Louis Business Centre in downtown Port Louis is not sure if we’re in the right place. The staff at the front desk are bewildered by our request to speak to someone from the company. The otherwise modest office block has flat-screen televisions on the walls and glossy magazines with titles like Savile Row and Family Business on a table in a small waiting area.

After about 20 minutes, a woman in a suit appears, bearing apologies—she had been out to lunch. At first, she seems to mistake us for investors in Malawi Mangoes. We jump in to clarify: We’re journalists looking to talk to someone from the company, which in 2014 received a $5 million loan from the private investment arm of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Our interlocutor appears confused, as if she knows little about the business, or why we might be attempting to learn more about it in Port Louis, Mauritius.

She confirms that Malawi Mangoes, a company whose plantations and juice-making operations are located over 1,500 miles away in Malawi, is indeed registered at this address, but she declines tell us anything else. There is no one from the company here to speak to, no one to interview, no pamphlets or brochures we can read.

Mauritius sits 1,200 miles off the eastern coast of southern Africa, in the Indian Ocean. It’s an isolated island, without an endowment of exploitable natural resources like oil or minerals. Simon Springett, the United Nations resident coordinator for the island, told us that when the country became independent from the United Kingdom in 1968, “economists basically said there’s no way Mauritius can survive as an independent nation-state.”

Sugar cane had been the country’s core crop for centuries. Sugar is still produced in Mauritius, but the island owes much of its modern prosperity to the development of another more controversial industry.

In 2018, Mauritius has an international reputation built around extremely low taxes—a flat corporate tax rate of 15 percent and an effective rate as low as zero to 3 percent for offshore companies—as well as high levels of financial secrecy. Global businesses registered in Mauritius have assets valued at more than $630 billion, almost 25 times the country’s own GDP of $26 billion. Its offshore financial industry includes more than 21,000 registered businesses —almost 70 times the number of primary schools in the country. However, these firms don’t take up a lot of space; many of them exist only on paper, set up to benefit from the island’s cut-rate taxes and its “ask no questions” attitude.

Since the early 1990s, Mauritius has remade itself into an African tax haven, where multinational corporations and ultra-rich individuals can stash their cash and profits and minimize their tax bills, away from the prying eyes of other governments and the public.

As the private investment arm of the World Bank, the IFC is tasked with investing in businesses in developing countries to help “end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity,” while also making money to support the bank’s other programs. Despite its mandate to help the world’s poorest people, it seems to have largely turned a blind eye to the controversial role Mauritius plays in the global tax system—and, in some cases, it has likely profited from the country’s remoteness and opaque financial services itself.

The IFC has approved loans and investments in more than 1,600 companies since 2012. According to our analysis of their project disclosures, at least 50 of these were for companies registered in Mauritius but operating elsewhere. Many of these companies, including Malawi Mangoes, are based in sub-Saharan Africa, and their registration in Mauritius may be depriving African governments of much needed-tax revenue.

Last year, the African Business Review reported that nearly 60 percent of investments made by international companies registered in Mauritius were destined for mainland Africa. Mauritius has been accused by civil society groups such as Oxfam of draining public resources from poorer countries by allowing multinational investors to shift their profits here, enabling them to pay much less than their fair share of taxes in the countries where they actually operate. And in 2013, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa criticized the island as “a relatively financially secretive conduit” that facilitates illicit financial flows across the continent.

Malawi Mangoes is one of the companies in which the IFC has invested. It was founded in 2009 by a pair of British entrepreneurs, Jonathan Jacobs and Craig Hardie. From the Salima district in central Malawi, it produces mango and banana puree and fresh fruit for export around Africa, to the Middle East, and to Europe.

When the IFC approved its $5 million investment in Malawi Mangoes in 2014, it was described as an agribusiness project in the soft drink sector, with the loan going to support the company as it tried to establish itself in the country. This would create much-needed rural jobs, the IFC argued, “thus injecting money to the local economy through wages and benefits paid.” Economic growth in poorer countries like Malawi is being held back, the IFC contends, by “the lack of risk capital” needed to “build the dynamic, job-creating companies that drive prosperity.”

To even be eligible for its support, projects must be located in a developing country and “have good prospects of being profitable”—but also “benefit the local economy; and Be environmentally and socially sound.” And though the IFC’s investment location is listed as Malawi, the funds actually go to “Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited.”

Company records in Mauritius and the United Kingdom, where the owners have filed paperwork, reveal that Malawi Mangoes moved its business to Mauritius after it had already started working in Malawi. This is significant because it appears to contradict claims that Mauritius is encouraging investment in Africa that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Malawi Mangoes was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2009, according to financial records filed in London. This U.K. entity was dissolved in 2015. By then, Malawi Mangoes had incorporated two companies in Mauritius (in 2012 and 2013), under the island’s global business system. In other words: Mauritius didn’t facilitate the company’s entrance into Malawi. It had already happened.

This suggests that Malawi Mangoes was attracted to Mauritius by something else: not the chance to move into Africa for the first time, but more likely its low taxes, high secrecy levels, and what the World Bank touts as its “ease of doing business.”

Despite the IFC’s poverty-reducing mandate and its requirement that projects benefit the local economy, the institution, and the World Bank as a whole, has been criticized for years for investing in commercial projects with dubious impacts on poor communities, including five-star hotels, upmarket shopping malls, and even agribusiness projects that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

On its website, the IFC explains how potential investments are reviewed, with proposals that are supposed to contain information such as the company’s finances and expected profits. IFC teams assess whether projects will comply with environmental and social performance standards, which cover issues such as labor conditions, land acquisition, and biodiversity—but not taxation, let alone tax justice.

The IFC’s disclosure explains that Malawi Mangoes is majority-owned by BXR Group, a private investment group in Amsterdam, and that the second-largest shareholder is “well-known fund manager and philanthropist” Stewart Newton. The project’s environmental and social review says Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited is “a holding company that runs an operation in Malawi.” No explanation is provided in the disclosure, however, as to why a company structured like this was deemed a suitable investment for the IFC, or why the entity receiving IFC money would be based on the Indian Ocean island.

Because this company is registered in Mauritius, where such information is not disclosed, we could not determine its annual revenues, profits, or how much tax it pays. However, it was reported locally in Malawi earlier this year that the company had secured 1,700 hectares of farmland near its existing plantations to expand its operations, and that its mango exports so far have already been worth more than $1.4 million.

The IFC’s disclosures also hint at possible problems on the ground in Malawi. In 2014, it said Malawi Mangoes had more than 600 employees, with the lowest-paid workers making just $35 a month. Though this is described as 20 percent higher than Malawi’s minimum wage, the company has also subsidized maize purchases for its workers during periods of the year when they could not afford it. And while the company does buy fruit from small-scale farmers through so-called outgrower schemes, it does not appear that local farmers or the Malawian economy are the main beneficiaries of the company’s activities.

Last year, a report in Malawi’s Maravi Post claimed that a senior chief in the Salima district “made shabby land deals” with Malawi Mangoes for which she allegedly pocketed proceeds and left “affected families” largely uncompensated.

Vigils were reportedly organized for 18 days at Salima District Commission offices to demand her removal as chief. “This land was sold dubiously to foreigners, without consultations but only telling us that it was government which allocated it,” one of the demonstrators, Muhamad Chingomanje, was quoted as saying. “We are not against developmental projects on our land, but … we want to benefit from its proceeds.”

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa says illicit financial flows from Africa could be worth as much as $50 billion per year—double the amount of official international aid budgeted for the continent—with impacts including drained foreign exchange reserves and worsening poverty. Tax havens enable this, it explains, by allowing for the creation of “disguised corporations, shell companies, anonymous trust accounts, and fake charitable foundations.”

The secrecy afforded in places like Mauritius may facilitate illegal practices—though the real story is how tax havens enable aggressive tax practices and legal tax avoidance on a massive scale, with companies taking advantage of gaps and mismatches in tax rules to shift their profits and declare them not where their real business is, but where they’ll pay less. This is part of a larger story about how countries have been sucked into competing with one another to offer the best deal to corporations, regardless of the impacts on their economy and their citizens. Then there is the impact on countries like Malawi, which is even worse for the public purse.

According to the IMF, developing countries’ revenue losses from what’s called “base erosion and profit-shifting” may exceed $200 billion.

This issue has been acknowledged at the very top of the World Bank as well. In 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said: “Some companies use elaborate strategies to not pay taxes in countries in which they work, a form of corruption that hurts the poor. More equitable taxation could easily eclipse official development assistance received by countries.”

Mauritius is an epicenter of this sort of profit-shifting. In addition to its flat tax rate of 15 percent, there is no capital gains tax and no tax on dividends or interest paid to nonresidents. Companies don’t even need to have a direct physical presence with staff on the island: This can also be outsourced to agents of financial services firms, whose employees may act as representatives for many companies at a time—just like those we met in Port Louis, at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address, who appeared surprised to be asked questions about the firm.

Once in Mauritius, it also helps for a business to have more than one subsidiary to take advantage of different incentives offered to different types of companies. Malawi Mangoes’ company records list two businesses in the country: Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited, incorporated in April 2012, and Malawi Mangoes Management (Mauritius) Limited, set up in January 2013. Both are incorporated as offshore companies within the island’s global business system and registered to the same address: “St Louis Business Centre, CNR Desroches & St Louis Streets, Port Louis.”

This is where we went in Mauritius, to ask about the company’s business and why it was running an operation in Malawi from an island so far away. But it’s just a care-of address, at the offices of a financial services firm called Rogers Capital, which helps its customers set up and manage offshore entities, lends its address for their registration forms, and keeps their details under wraps.

That pattern holds for other IFC investments in sub-Saharan Africa, made via Mauritius instead of directly in the countries of operation. In the capital of Port Louis, we had more Kafkaesque experiences. In one small office, on a narrow road in the city’s Chinatown, we found the registered office of CSquared, a broadband internet infrastructure business operating in several countries including Ghana and Uganda that counts Google among its investors. There, the man we spoke to would not even confirm the address of the building we were sitting in.

The IFC says clearly on its website that “tax evasion is unacceptable in any part of a transaction in which the World Bank Group is involved.” It insists that it “exercises due diligence to confirm that the structures in which it invests are chosen for legitimate reasons” and that it’s “committed to advancing the international tax transparency agenda.”

This sounds serious, but the language used also carefully limits the problem to illegal activity. Tax evasion is the illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax. But for multinational companies, there are many strategies to limit tax bills that may be currently legal but still highly questionable—particularly for an institution, backed by the world’s governments, with an explicit mandate to help end poverty and boost “shared prosperity.”

Anti-poverty and tax justice nongovernmental organizations have argued for years that the IFC shouldn’t be investing in companies using tax havens at all, as such structures enable information on money made and taxes paid to be hidden from governments as well as the public. Legitimate reasons for companies to incorporate in tax havens may be a matter of interpretation, but it cannot be publicly scrutinized or debated if businesses’ information is never disclosed.

In 2016, Oxfam accused the World Bank of “turning a blind eye” to the use of tax havens by the companies that the IFC invests in. It also scrutinized IFC disclosure information and found that 25 percent of all of the organization’s investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 were directly allocated to companies incorporated in tax havens, with almost 9 percent of the projects in Mauritius. What’s more, it found that a large majority of firms receiving IFC financing use tax havens, apparently unconnected to their core business, at some point in their corporate structure.

Oxfam demanded that the World Bank “ensure that its clients can prove they are paying their fair share of tax” and confirm that these businesses aren’t taking “advantage of the weakness of the system to reduce their tax bill to the minimum, especially through the artificial shift of profits” to countries like Mauritius. The organization suggested specifically that “responsible corporate tax considerations—beyond legal compliance” should be incorporated into the IFC’s environmental and social performance standards immediately and used to review and monitor their array of investments.

At the time, an IFC spokesperson responded by inaccurately characterizing the NGO’s criticisms as focused on illegal tax evasion, again stressing that “there are legitimate uses for offshore structures.”

This week, an IFC spokesman told Foreign Policy that the organization would only invest in a company if it was “satisfied with the integrity of the client and that the structure of the transaction is legitimate and not designed to be used for tax evasion.” The spokesman reiterated the argument that “Offshore Financial Centers can play a key role in cross-border investment,” especially when a host country lacks certain laws, contract enforcement mechanisms, or shareholder protections. “Appropriate use of intermediate jurisdictions,” he argued, “enables increased mobilization of private capital for investment that helps the poor.”

According to the spokesman, the IFC’s investment in Malawi Mangoes was “to support rural incomes through development of commercial production and processing of mangoes and bananas in a region where poverty is high” and that it was subject to the “policy on use of intermediate jurisdictions” and found to be acceptable. The IFC also pointed out that its performance standards “were developed before some of the public focus on tax and illicit financial flows” and that it was now updating its policies based on new and evolving international standards. It is unclear if Malawi Mangoes would qualify under the new standards.

According to the IFC, Malawi Mangoes has failed to ramp up its production and never generated any profits. This, of course, does not alter the nature of the tax arrangements the company set up for that eventuality.

Malawi Mangoes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last October, the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, revived the old narrative of the island’s dim economic prospects in an interview with the Financial Times. “We are a small island that is limited in many ways. We don’t have any natural resources,” he told the newspaper.

“We need to have an edge over others to be attractive,” Jugnauth added. “I think the advantage in taxation is important.”

At the World Bank office in Port Louis, the argument is much the same. Alex Sienaert, the country representative for Mauritius, said the offshore industry has benefited the island, providing a source of foreign exchange and encouraging kids to stay in school and work hard to get offshore office jobs. He said there is a sense among young people in the country that if “I can qualify as an accountant or a lawyer, there’s a good job for me, an office job, on the island. … That’s been going on for well over a generation now.”

But he acknowledged that “you do hear some concerns.” The offshore industry in Mauritius employs a surprisingly small fraction of the population—just 5,000 workers directly in a country of over 1 million people. And not all boats have been lifted equally by the island’s transformation into a corporate utopia. In March, the World Bank warned in a new 147-page report that inequality among Mauritians has “widened substantially” over the last 15 years, “threatening the standards of living of the poor.”

According to the report, the gap between the incomes of the poorest and the richest 10 percent of households increased by 37 percent from 2001 to 2015. One of the report’s authors attributed this to structural changes, including a “progressive shift from traditional and low-skills sectors to services, notably professional, real estate, and financial services,” which not all workers benefited from. Women, in particular, did not share in the gains, with only 57 percent of them in the labor force by 2015, and women in the private sector have been paid on average about 30 percent less than men.

Sienaert at the World Bank told us, “there’s no question that the tax appeal of Mauritius is an important part of the story,” acknowledging that this is “an increasingly less sustainable way to go.” It would be better for Mauritius to become “a conduit for international companies to come into Africa perhaps for the first time, facilitating new activity that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” he said. “Then you’re in win-win territory.”

“That’s not to say it’s going to be an easy transition,” Sienaert added. Like the March report from the World Bank, he had nothing to say about the IFC’s investments via Mauritius and gave the impression that he didn’t know they existed. And much like the staff at the office where the headquarters of Malawi Mangoes is registered on the island, he appeared surprised by our questions on the topic.

Last weekend, the World Bank brought together country delegations and development experts at its annual meetings in Indonesia. The IFC was there, too. At such conferences, grand statements are made while attendees tend to mill around banners bearing pledges to better the world.

Rather than repeating tired mantras about job-creating companies bringing prosperity to the poorest corners of Africa, these powerful international institutions—whose mandates are built around expanding shared prosperity and alleviating poverty—should be asking about the mango farmers in Malawi’s Salima district, and who profited (or didn’t) from the IFC’s support.’

We have a child-care crisis in this country. We had the solution 78 years ago.

By Dayna M. Kurtz, Washington Post, July 23, 2018

Millions of babies are born in this country every year, although the numbers are declining. Last year, the United States had its lowest birthrate in 30 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a new survey, in which participants were asked why they were having fewer children than they wanted, the top responses were almost all economic. Babies are costly, and the current administration is not offering relief for the majority anytime soon.

For all the joy and privilege of becoming a mother in America, most of us are navigating a host of challenges with little to no societal support: the physical effects of labor, the chronic sleep deprivation, the complexities of breast-feeding (logistically and politically), juggling the demands of work and family. But perhaps the most daunting is finding and paying for child care.

The United States holds the dubious distinction of being the only developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave as a federal mandate. If and when a woman returns to work after having a baby, she must confront the sobering reality of securing care for her child. Once she determines whether there are viable options in her area--by no means a given--she’s likely to encounter a wait list. If a spot does become available, she must then contend with sticker shock: In more than half of states, the cost of child care exceeds public university tuition.

It hasn’t always been like this. Once upon a time, the country set mothers up for greater success, if only unintentionally.

During World War II, as more and more men found themselves on the front lines, ammunition factories were short of workers. The solution: Women took their jobs. During the war, 6.5 million American women joined the labor force; the percentage of working women with children younger than 10 increased from 7.8 to 12.1 percent between 1940 and 1944. This significant uptick in working mothers left countless young children at home and unsupervised.

The government resolved the quandary by swiftly amending the Lanham Act. The 1940 law, which allowed for the provision of war-related grants, would now also provide for the establishment of federally subsidized child-care centers nationwide.

Serving thousands of families across all income levels, these programs were innovative, smartly designed and well equipped to serve mothers’ needs. In addition to play spaces, they included medical clinics that provided vaccinations and routine health care, as well as infirmaries where sick children could be tended to by doctors and nurses. They offered an amenity that would make today’s parents swoon: personal shoppers who fulfilled a mom’s customized grocery list while she was at work. Items were bagged and ready when she came to pick up her children at quitting time, right down to the chicken dinner.

At the program’s peak in 1944, 130,000 children were enrolled. The federal government spent $52 million on the program between August 1943 and February 1946; parents paid an additional $26 million in user fees, which in today’s dollars would be $9 or $10 a day.

A report released at the time suggested overwhelming satisfaction with these centers. More than 80 percent of those surveyed had favorable opinions, while nearly 90 percent said the programs should be established in every school district and made available to both working and stay-at-home moms. In a much more recent analysis of the far-ranging effect of the program, Chris Herbst of Arizona State University reported on the outcomes of the children who were enrolled. “They were more likely to be employed, have higher earnings, and less likely to need cash assistance as adults,” he writes. “In addition, the benefits of the program accrued largely to the most economically disadvantaged individuals.”

After the war ended, the Child Welfare League of America lobbied to keep the centers open. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column, “Many thought [the centers] were purely a war emergency measure. A few of us had an inkling that perhaps they were a need which was constantly with us, but one that we had neglected to face in the past … it would seem to be in the interests of the community to organize child care centers and see that they are properly run. Where state help is needed, it should be given; and when states are incapable of giving sufficient help, it should be forthcoming on a national scale as it has been in the war years.” But the efforts of Roosevelt and others were for naught. Despite irrefutable evidence of the program’s efficacy, funding was cut shortly after the end of the war, and centers were closed within a year or two.

In 1971, we came close to realizing a second nationwide, federally subsidized system of child care. Then current research on children’s development during the critical zero- to 5-year period helped inform Congress’s decision to pass the Comprehensive Child Development Act with bipartisan support. According to the plan, free care would be provided to the country’s poorest children, with their more advantaged peers enrolled on a sliding scale. Shortly after Congress took action, President Richard M. Nixon was scheduled to visit China. In an unfortunate twist, conservative presidential adviser Pat Buchanan framed the act as not only fiscally irresponsible, but also a threat to democracy at large. He suggested that federally subsidized day care would impose the “moral authority” of the government, systematically weakening the nation’s families. Nixon vetoed the act, and mothers were again left to fend for themselves.

Although the Lanham and Comprehensive Child Development Acts fizzled, they established compelling precedents for federally funded day care. In fact, the government is still enacting some versions of them. One is Early Head Start, a child-care program run by the Administration for Children & Families. Intended for youngsters from birth to age 3 who fall at or below the poverty level, and for homeless and foster children, EHS lacks the necessary funding to meet the demand, and wait lists are the norm. The second option is afforded to military families. After identifying that a surprising number of those on active duty had been absent from training because of a lack of child care, the Army decided that providing reliable access was a matter of national security--not unlike in the 1940s.

The Military Child Care Act of 1989 outlines a detailed plan. Cost is determined by parental income level. A mother who enrolls her child generally pays no more than 10 percent of her salary, a sharp contrast to her civilian peers, who are likely to pay twice that. Military child-care centers are conveniently located on base, and are uniformly accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. (Only about 10 percent of their nonmilitary counterparts are accredited by the NAEYC or a similar organization.)

The child-care models offered by the Lanham and Military Child Care acts are neither uniquely inspired nor perfect. What they were, and are, is funded: paid for because those in power appreciated a substantial risk to our country if those resources were unavailable. The truth is, a larger, pervasive threat already exists. Forty-two percent of children younger than 5 live in parts of the country considered “child-care deserts,” rural areas where no child-care centers are located or can meet the demand. This results in lost wages and benefits for parents who are forced to quit jobs to care for their children at home. Families who can access day care are forced to pour the bulk of the resources into covering those costs.

Yet President Trump’s budget for fiscal 2018 indicates a $100 million cut in funding to military child care. His daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump’s child-care plan, a proposal that offers tax deductions determined by the cost of child care in each state, has been reported by members of both parties to favor those who need it the least--the rich.

Raising the next generation of citizens to run our country requires love, time and attention, obligations most parents fulfill. But it also requires money, more than most hard-working parents can come by, and they are responding by having fewer children. We might not be embroiled in a world war, but as a nation that depends on robust birthrates to thrive, we are imperiled.

New Pandemic Plight: Hospitals Are Running Out of Vaccines

Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, is now struggling with a similar problem as the hospitals serving some of its poorest residents run out of the vaccine, prompting some public health experts to question why doses are not being made more available to vulnerable communities.

Covid-19 Vaccines ›

Answers to Your Vaccine Questions

If I live in the U.S., when can I get the vaccine?

While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is getting made, this article will help.

When can I return to normal life after being vaccinated?

Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to getting infected. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against becoming sick. But it’s also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they’re infected because they experience only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists don’t yet know if the vaccines also block the transmission of the coronavirus. So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on. Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve that goal, life might start approaching something like normal by the fall 2021.

If I’ve been vaccinated, do I still need to wear a mask?

Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially get authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical trials that delivered these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while they’re not experiencing any cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be intensely studying this question as the vaccines roll out. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to think of themselves as possible spreaders.

Will it hurt? What are the side effects?

The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection won’t be any different from ones you’ve gotten before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems. But some of them have felt short-lived discomfort, including aches and flu-like symptoms that typically last a day. It’s possible that people may need to plan to take a day off work or school after the second shot. While these experiences aren’t pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and mounting a potent response that will provide long-lasting immunity.

Will mRNA vaccines change my genes?

No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse to a cell, allowing the molecule to slip in. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any moment, each of our cells may contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce in order to make proteins of their own. Once those proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can only survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a bit longer, so that the cells can make extra virus proteins and prompt a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only last for a few days at most before they are destroyed.

“These are our frontline workers who are at the greatest risk of contracting the virus and at the greatest risk of spreading it to others,” said Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. “We would be able to resolve the pandemic in Harris County quicker if we could get a sufficient number of vaccines,” she added, referring to the county encompassing much of Houston.

Adding to the turmoil, just days after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, praised the state’s vaccine rollout at a meeting in Houston where Democratic city and county officials were excluded from participating, the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, also a Republican, sent a letter on Thursday to the state’s Expert Vaccination Allocation Panel urging its members to fix the problems.

“Right now, in many cities and counties when an announcement of available vaccinations is made, website sign-up pages crash and phone calls go unanswered,” Mr. Patrick said in the letter. “Texans need to have a better understanding of the time it will take for everyone to be vaccinated in order to reduce lines, confusion and frustration.”

The sense of chaos afflicting the distribution efforts, not just in Texas but in an array of states, is laying bare how local officials are struggling to fill the void left by the lack, until this week, of a comprehensive response at the federal level.

Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said the most obvious problem with vaccine administration in the San Francisco area was clear: “There’s not enough doses, period,” he said. “That’s it. Everything would work fine if you had enough doses.”

The public health department in San Francisco and hospitals in the city were “caught by surprise” by the lack of doses, Dr. Rutherford said, and by the eligibility expansion to those 65 and older, which likely strained the system. Varying vaccine distribution channels — such as Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco — receive the doses on their own, he said, further complicating an already convoluted distribution system.

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Pixar’s Soul: Who Are All of 22’s Mentors?

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This article contains Soul spoilers. You can find our spoiler-free review here.

22, the incorrigible soul voiced by Tina Fey, has resided in the Great Before for a very, very long time. But just how long is that? Centuries? Millennia? By virtue of her name, a number designated to her soul upon arrival in the Great Before, it is hinted that she’s been watching our world with skepticism since the very beginning: a soul who’s had eons to say, “No, that living thing is not for me.”

In all that time, she’s also had countless mentors: Souls who completed a life on Earth and before going to the Great Beyond agreed to take some time off on the other side to offer 22 pointers on the finer things of life. Until she met a guy named Joe, it never ended well. That said it sets up one of the movie’s best running gags. Throughout Joe and 22’s experiences, the film frequently flashes back to random insert jokes about 22’s past, highly esteemed teachers.

It creates an opportunity for Pixar to dabble in the strangest bit of referential humor we may have ever seen in a kids’ movie. After all, how many young minds are familiar with the works of Carl Jung? It also  gives parents time for a couple of specific laughs, and maybe the chance to talk with their children afterward about just who those floating heads were. For that reason, we’ve compiled this handy list and brief guide to 22’s mentors.

Abraham Lincoln

One of the first dropped names from 22’s past mentors, and the one most often referenced in the film, is Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps this is because unlike George Orwell, most American school children under the age of 10 should be familiar with the 16th President of the United States.

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Elected in 1860 and reelected in 1864, Lincoln is cited by many to be the greatest president in American history due to his ability to lead the nation through its greatest existential crisis, the Civil War. During that cataclysmic moment, he preserved the Union and eventually ended slavery, first in rebelling states via the Emancipation Proclamation and then more completely with the 13th Amendment. He then became a martyr in the eyes of the generations to follow since shortly after his reelection and the end of the war, he was the first president to be assassinated.

Most kids should know that, and they definitely know he’s on the penny. Hence the terrific joke of 22 asking Lincoln, “Are you really okay with being on the penny?” He insists it’s a great honor. But when she twists the knife and says, “Even with Jackson on the 20 [dollar bill]?” he breaks in abject horror. Not Jackson!

Mahatma Gandhi

Another name dropped early—though I’m not sure we ever see him as an actual mentor—is Mahatma Gandhi, the nonviolent civil disobedience Indian leader who helped India achieve its independence from the British Empire.

Born in 1869 Gujarat, India, Gandhi had a profound effect on world history in the 20th century and beyond. After being educated in London and spending his early professional life in South Africa, where he raised a family, he returned to India and led anti-colonialist campaigns against the British government that occupied British India, as well as pushed for reforms that would create a religious plurality. He was briefly President of the Indian National Conference between 1924 and ’25, and eventually took to wearing his now famous loincloths and shawls as an act of solidarity with the working poor of his country. His image as the fasting leader of nonviolent resistance influenced civil rights leaders around the world.

In 1947, Britain resigned itself to granting India independence, but split the British Indian Empire into states, India and Pakistan, the latter becoming a country for India’s Muslim population. The resulting hostilities and tension eventually led to Gandhi being assassinated in 1948.

Mother Teresa

An honest to goodness saint, Mother Teresa was a Roman Catholic leader who dedicated her life to wholeheartedly caring for “the poorest of the poor.” So when she tells 22, “I like everyone except you,” you know 22 just has the devil in her—if such a thing exists in a theoretical construct like the Great Before!

Born Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu in 1910, Teresa grew up in what is modern day North Macedonia, before she left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland. Soon moving to India, where she lived the rest of her life, Teresa took her solemn vows to become a nun in 1937 and in 1950 founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Catholic congregation that’s seen its sisterhood of nuns grow by the thousands. Until Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, she helped oversee her missionary’s fourth vow, again to serve the poorest of the poor, by managing homes of people dying of leprosy, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, as well as managing soup kitchens, dispensaries, and orphanages.

Teresa was canonized as a saint in 2016, with Sept. 5, the anniversary of her death, now being a feast day in the Catholic religion.

Nicolaus Copernicus

One of the older mentors we meet in flashback, Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance Man who really took the concept of being a “renaissance man” to heart. Both a polyglot and polymath, the Prussian thinker was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, economist, and a doctorate in canon law with the Church. He spoke either five or six languages, and most importantly, is considered one of the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century. Indeed, this early era of scientific progress is also called the Copernican Revolution.

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That is due to the fact Copernicus published his model of the universe shortly before his death in 1543. With his astronomical findings, he posited that the sun, as opposed to the Earth, is the actual center of the universe. This discovery—which really rediscovered a forgotten breakthrough from antiquity postulated by Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos in the second century B.C.E.—led to a better understanding of the universe, and eventually that the sun was merely the center of our solar system. Copernicus shattered the eco-centric view of the universe preached by the Church forever.

So when he tells 22 that she needs to stop thinking “you’re the center of the universe,” it’s pretty damn funny.

Muhammad Ali

The self-described Greatest to ever enter a boxing ring, Muhammad Ali remains arguably the most famous heavyweight champ in boxing history, as well as a significant figure in the anti-Vietnam War and counterculture movements of the 1960s. So when he calls 22 “the greatest… pain in my neck,” she better listen up!

Born Cassius Clay Jr. in 1942, the man who would become Ali first won the heavyweight belt after beating Sonny Liston by TKO in 1963. At age 22, Clay became the youngest fighter to ever take the heavyweight title from a reigning champ, a record he still holds to this day. Shortly after the victory, Clay joined the Nation of Islam and eventually changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

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Despite being the Greatest, Ali lost four years from his peak athletic career when he refused to be drafted into the U.S. military and serve in Vietnam on the grounds of being a conscientious objector. He was found guilty of draft evasion, stripped of his boxing titles, and denied the ability to professionally enter a ring until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971. Older but arguably even bolder in rhetoric, Ali suffered some losses in his later career yet still reclaimed the heavyweight title when he knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round of the “Rumble in the Jungle.”

Marie Antoinette

The French Queen does not say anything particularly pun-y to 22, but her floating head is a great visual sight gag to anyone who knows how the French Revolution ended!

Marie Antoinette, a doomed and largely misrepresented monarch, was Queen of France from 1774 to 1792. Prior to that she was born an archduchess of Austria, one of the Emperor’s youngest children. She was married off to the French dauphin Louis in an arranged and loveless marriage at the age of 14 in 1770. Her standing in court improved after she began having children, however she became a popular figure of resentment in anti-monarchist pamphlets, which painted her as a promiscuous harlot whose children were illegitimate, and who conspired with her native Austria against France. It is from this caricature where the lie of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake” was born.

Eventually she and King Louis XVI were arrested by leaders of the French Revolution, who eventually abolished the monarchy in 1792. Her husband was executed in front of the mob in January 1793; in October of the same year Marie Antoinette was tried by Revolutionary Tribunal for high treason. Two days later she likewise was executed by guillotine before the cheers of the mob.

Carl Jung

About as cerebral an easter egg as one might expect from a Disney movie, Carl Jung appears briefly in a montage to tell 22 to “stop talking, my unconscious mind hates you!” We’re sure any parents who ever took a Psychology 101 course smiled.

Considered one of the pioneers of modern psychology, Jung was the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Born in 1875, Jung saw the world change drastically during his lifetime and career from the 19th century until his death in 1961. This includes in the breakthroughs made by him and his onetime mentor, Sigmund Freud. Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, considered Jung his heir until their diverging visions for the future of a “talking cure” created a schism between the men.

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Jung’s analytical psychology was founded largely upon the idea of individuation, which related to the lifelong psychological process the mind is said to go through, separating an individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. This also led Jung to develop concepts like the collective unconscious and extraversion versus introversion. Whichever 22 is, she clearly doesn’t want Jung’s company!

George Orwell

One of the funniest, and honestly most subversive, easter eggs is only quickly alluded to when 22 (inside Joe’s body) drops some George Orwell truth bombs on an impressionable young girl, and Joe’s jazz student. “Like my mentor George Orwell used to say, ‘State sponsored education was like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket,’” 22 announces. “‘The ruling class’ core curriculum stifles dissent.’”

While the real Orwell didn’t exactly say these words (at least as I can find), he was of course an extremely wary and sharp critic of both governmental and capitalist control. In another Orwell chestnut, he opined the future is “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” Never the optimist, Orwell wrote perennial high school favorites Animal Farm—a parable about the corruption of the Soviet Union and Bolshevik Revolution with talking animals—and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate dystopian text about an authoritarian regime controlling every facet of citizens’ lives, with propaganda being administered by the “Ministry of Truth,” as but one example.

Orwell likely was skeptical of state education, and probably would have been even more so of the recent phenomenon of corporate sponsored education, since he wrote, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” In this vein, he did refer to capitalism’s use as advertising as “the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket” that led to the “blind worship of the money-god.”

That this is quoted in a Disney movie intended to sell toys, theme park attractions, more “swill” to the masses is a little amusing… if disheartening that the quote was reappropriated to overlook the fully anti-capitalist thrust of Orwell’s sentiment.

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First Blog Post: Cape Town Day 1

Sunday Feb 11 2018

Growing Pains

I landed in Cape Town at 7:30am local time (CTT= Cape Town Time/ CT= Cape Town).  Because I slept from SFO to Heathrow, I got little to no sleep from Heathrow to Cape Town, resulting in my accidental all-nighter from 11:30pm CTT.  Everything is sort of hazy and out of whack.  It seems like everything that could have gone slightly wrong, has gone slightly wrong.  Or, at least, very far from the expected result.  The first of these instances was in the CT airport.  There was a driver that was supposed to meet me at 8am CTT and by 8:20am I was starting to feel quite nervous, as it is easy to direct my unease about the general situation of moving continents towards a short-term, tangible problem like my transportation.  By this time, I am sweating from nerves and general physical exhaustion from hauling my duffle bag around looking for the guy who is supposed to have a sign directing me to him.  Finally, I call the emergency number of the program I’m going through and they tell me to go to the information desk and wait for him to meet me there.  So I do.   Another 20 minutes later, all is well and my driver, Kyle, is blasting Lil’ Jon while speeding down the highway past the poorest parts of CT.  There are thousands of houses made out of scrap metal.  I saw roofs held onto structures by the weight of fractured concrete, wooden planks and sheets of tin propped up against each other, some structures were even two stories high.  Then we were zooming through Cape Town, the first thing I saw was the prison, which was almost as depressing as the slums.  But once we cleared the poorer outskirts, the water was visible and it was stunning.  It was like the surface was covered in gold glitter it was sparkling so much.  We stopped in front of a house in a rundown neighborhood, directly facing a large, white, and mostly windowless primary school.  Kyle grabs my duffle bag out of the car (bless him) and dispassionately drops me and it at the front door of a dusty, brick-red house.  I ring the doorbell as Kyle drives off.  Nobody answers.  After a minute, I ring again.  Still, nobody answers.  I reach past the metal grate blocking the wooden door and knock.  I am starting to panic (again) and am knocking and ringing, feeling stranded and mildly disgusted at the dead, partially-squished rat I had to walk over to get to the door.  10 minutes pass.  I am still frantically knocking.  Then, I hear something. A short girl answers the door.  She’s maybe 24, with a sleeve of tattoos- one of which is a large elephant with a very South African looking tree next to it.  I introduce myself and she says her name is Cassie and she essentially runs the hostel.  She takes me upstairs and shows me my room with three bunkbeds lining the walls, and a file-cabinet-like dresser against the fourth.  The floor is covered in clothes and there is a girl sleeping in her underwear surrounded by around 5 half-empty fanta bottles and two sticky glasses with flat soda in them.  I say hello and she makes no noise, clearly a bit irritated her sleep has been interrupted.  Cassie tells me to meet her downstairs in a few minutes when I settle in.  I sit down on the bed and basically curl up in a ball of confusion, anxiety, and relief.   When I have taken some deep breaths, reapply deodorant, and listed things I am grateful for and things I want to learn, I hop down the dirty stairs in the dim  house and find Cassie.  She gives me a brief tour of the house and shows me how I have to shower in a bucket and then dump the bucket in a larger bucket.  Then, when you want to take a number 2 you have to walk to the big bucket, fill up a small bucket with water, then find a way to dump the water in the small bucket into the toilet tank so you can flush.  This is way harder than it sounds and it an extremely awkward process that is almost as stressful as it is embarrassing for me because if you grab the bucket everyone knows you aren't just going number 1.  Most of my stress here hinges on the idea of making myself more embarrassed than I already am by fûcking up this process in one way (technically this whole extravaganza is called a grey-water system). After the somewhat unnerving house tour, I am starting to realize how incredibly foreign all of this is.  Moving to and living in Florence was traveling to another country, Cape Town is another planet.  Everything feels slightly uneasy when you walk down the streets.  I felt very watched and distrustful of anyone around me because I had been warned so thoroughly about the impressive theft that was pulled off, even in broad daylight. Then, the first genuinely positive interaction of my day happens.  Three girls, Jonna (Sweden), Ella (Sweden), and Natália (Brazil) say that they're gong to the beach and if I don’t have any plans I should come with them to get lunch and then go to the beach.  The tight little ball in my chest loosens. We all go to the grocery store and upon our return, Cassie comes up to me and tells me that tomorrow I am moving to a HomeStay.  My reaction is:  “WHAAAT??!?!?!?!??!?!????”.  I was NOT supposed to be at a Home-Stay and was clearly told by the volunteer service that I would be based at the volunteer hostel.  I was completely caught off-guard and this was the LAST mix-up I would expect to happen.  I make her double-check that it’s the right person she’s talking about and she confirms that yes, in fact my program is in an area much closer to the poorer neighborhoods, because those are the kids we are serving.  Thus, I need to live close to them and that means living with a family.  WHAT THE FÜCK?  I regain my zen and try to just be a “go with the flow” kind of person, but I feel like a rock being unwillingly dragged down a river by the force of the water.  After many minutes of mindful breathing and sunscreen application, we are in the uber to the beach.   The beach is gorgeous.  The South African Sun was incredibly intense.  Even when applying several layers of thick sunscreen and sitting entirely in the shade, my skin was very offended I had decided to move to this continent.  That being said, there were white fluffy sand, colored umbrellas, beautiful and tan, beachy South Africans everywhere, so I told my skin to shut up.  My particular favorite of all my people-watching specimen was a 50-something woman in a hot pink bikini who was so freckled she passed it off as a deep tan.  She had a lower back tattoo that said “Brooklyn Forever” in swirly writing, some Chinese characters on her back, a ring of thorns around her bicep, and a kiss mark on her lower right hip.  Her small white lap dog came over and chilled on my towel while she drank some alcoholic beverage and told her four-year-old daughter to move out of her tanning chair because “I’m an ádult” (only self-important people say adult as aaaaadult).  She also told her friend to “stay on the hunt”, when a 20 year old lifeguard passed and they both obviously checked him out, even though they were both wearing wedding rings and surrounded by their own children.  From eavesdropping on their conversations I learned her name was Lisa, which fits all too well.   I hang out with my new friends and learn lots of cool information.  For example, Natalia has breast implants her boyfriend paid for as a present to her 5 months ago and is very happy to talk about them as a point of braggadocio (as it turns out, two americans in this volunteer hostel also have breast implants”.  Ella has four tattoos, one of which is very large on her forearm that says “There is no progress without struggle”.  She says she almost ran to the tattoo parlor on her 18th birthday to get it— but now she thinks it’s cliche.  Jonna is amazed at my ability to recite facts I learned from various podcasts I listened during my unintentional all-nighter to Cape Town.  For example, your likelihood of getting cancer increases by 40% if you average less than 7 hours of sleep per night over your lifetime.  Cassie and her sister Ashley end up joining us.  By that time I was entirely exhausted.  My face was telling me it was time to get out of the sun even though I was in the shade, with a hat and sunscreen on.  And, again, I was entirely exhausted so interaction with new people was a strain I was really not feeling.   Finally, we call and uber and go back to the hostel. I cannot get the idea of the host family off of my mind as I am moving there tomorrow and have exactly no information on who they are, where they live, what the conditions will be, how many people live there, etc.. I decide the best way to ease my anxiety is to get something done.  So, I go to the drug store down the street, Click-It.  I buy around 10 items and when I’m checking out, the cashier does something very odd.  He looks at me, smiles, and says “when you leave the alarm by the door might go off, just keep walking”.  I kind of smile and then process what he’s really said, then process the fact that him and his female co-worker at the other register just smiled at each other clearly in regards to what he has just said.  “Why” I ask.  “Because I am not going to scan all the items they want me to scan.  Don’t worry about it.  Just keep walking”.  At this point I’m like WHAT THE FÜCK IS GOING ON PART 2.  Is he saying he is giving me some of my items for free? What on earth is happening.  Well, then I go to pay with my Charles Schwab card that is supposed to be perfect and seamless to use and it’s DECLINED.  So I pay with Wells Fargo and the world starts turning again.  Right after I pick up my bag he reminds me “dont forget: DO NOT stop walking”. And Im like “Dude I just wanted my leave-in conditioner, I don’t need Mission-Impossible”  But, whatever, I’m only 95% sure I can understand the gist of what he is saying because I am still having trouble understanding South African English accents. I scurry home, through the accusatorially beeping metal detector with my newly aquired, and possibly partially stolen goods and take my brief, bucket shower.  Now, I am hiding in my top bunk, trying to collect myself and hide from human interaction because honestly, I’m getting close to being at wits-end.  I am too overwhelmed to edit this so #nofilter yay I completed my first blog post.  Happy First Day In South Africa, Bitches.

xoxo Q

How can a country move on when its people turn against their own?

Chile is not at war. The People has awoken and we will never close our eyes again!

If you haven’t read or heard about the difficult situation going on in Chile, please take a moment to read this, and then go and search for info on your own.

Chile has been qualified as the economical oasis of Latin America. But we couldn't be so further away from that.

Yes. There’s money... But it’s only for the rich. The minimum wage is $301.000 CLP, about 414 USD for today's conversion (Oct. 23.2019)  where 1 USD costs about 727 Chilean pesos. (Out lowest bill is a $1.000 and out lowest coin is $10)

I’ll put my family as an example. My parents work in the streets markets (Feria) My Dad sells fruits to make a living (tangerines, avocados, lemons and oranges). My Mom sells used items of clothing and house stuff (curtains, bed sheets, etc.) I’m unemployed because I haven’t graduated officially and I take care of my bedridden grandmother. We have enough to live, not a penny less, not one penny more.  My Father is the one who carries the weight of most of the house expenses and he, like many others, does not earn the same amount of money each month. So let me break it down for you:

4 people household:

Basic food items, 2 each: pasta, rice, vegetable oil, tuna cans, mayo, milk, paper towels, toilet paper, salt, sugar, beans and some miscellaneous items: comes to an amount of at least $80.000 CLP (110.19 USD)

Light bills: $36.000 CLP  (49.69 USD)

Water bills: $25.000 (34.44 USD) to $28.000 CLP (38.57 USD)

Internet bill (no land phone): $17.000 (23.42 USD)

Celphones: $27.000 (37.19 USD)

Gas (petrol) for the trucks: $50.000 (68.87 USD)

Gas for shower and kitchen (It’s sold in cans, we buy the 15kl cans): $45.000 (61.98 USD)

This list gives us the whooping amount of $283.000 CLP (389.81 USD). Remember, the minimum wage is $301.000 and I’m not including, public transport (where I live we don’t have Metro (subway/tube), medical bills (which are fucking high because public health sucks ass), medicines, and extra expenses for when you care for an old person and my college bill, which I don’t want to even think about because it’s millions of pesos that I’ll have to pay for the rest of my life because I studied with the CAE (Credito con aval del estado) a deal where the government pays for my college ed until I graduate and then two years later I have to start paying all the money back with interest.

Now that you have this picture in your head, imagine how others live, when there are families of five or more living with less than the minimum wage. My family manages to live like this, but there are others that are not as lucky.

The elderly people have to live with pensions as low as $84.000 CLP (115.7 USD) I’ve seen old people after the street markets hours trying to find scraps of fruit and vegetables so they have something to eat in the daily.

People need to understand that what is happening in Chile is not only about an increase on the public transport prices. Its so much more than that! But I’ll get there, I promise.

This year we’ve seen news like:

- A 4 month-old baby died because a “loose bullet” was shot God knows where and it broke the roof of a house and hit the kid in the head while he slept on its crib!

-A congressman that wants to enter the senate said “I don’t care if they call me lazy”

-The government wanted to increase the electricity bills by 9.2 percent.

-The robbery of the century: Police embezzlement reaches 26.700.000 million pesos. (36751.55 USD)

-Military forces stole 200 million dollars through the Reserved Copper Law doing duplicated invoices.

-Students in Quinteros closed the scholar year early due to contamination in the air and severe health issues.

We’ve seen collusion in supermarket prices, pharmacies, toilet papers, diapers, military, police and politicians tax evasion... What else do we have to endure?!

(Source in Spanish: Sigrid.pe)

And so the 6th of October of 2019 we wake up to the breaking news: “The government announces the increase of the public transport prices”

With everything I’ve told you already... Wouldn’t you be pissed to hell and back as well?? And I haven’t even told you about how shitty the public health is, how our education system favors the rich and forgets the poor. That our drinkable water is owned by privates, so is the energy and the mineral resources. Our highways belong to Spain... We have to pay money to travel from region to region, and the money doesn’t even stay in the country. This neoliberal model is broke us.

Chile has the most expensive subway rates in Latin America, and this is how it was supposed to be starting the October 6, 2019:

(I did my best at translating)

You can do the math with this numbers two or three times a day at least five days a week... 

The richest 10 percent of the Chilean people have an income 19 times higher than the poorest 10 percent... Here in Chile the parliamentarians earn the highest amounts of net income! The most well paid parliamentarians in Latin America and possibly the world. $9.500.000CLP (13076.39USD).  Look at this numbers, don’t even bother with the position of the politicians, just look at the numbers.

And so, high school students decided to take this upon themselves. The “Evasion” movement began, where thousands of underage students refused to pay to take the subway. This quickly escalated as college students and workers of various areas started to jump over the subway’s validation doors. What started as a passive-aggressive movement took a turn as the Chilean police went to the Subway( METRO) stations and started throwing teargas bombs at our under age students who had nothing to defend themselves with. The subway shut down services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd0d7iFZOB8 (You don’t need to know Spanish to understand what’s going on)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8acIrtYbb-c

This sparked a flame sleeping inside every citizen in this country. More and more people started to come out to the streets armed with nothing but cooking pots, pans and wooden spoons. But when the people rises, so does the government. Hundreds of police men went against the protestors. They started throwing teargas bombs at the people, careless of the children, the old, the innocent. Yes, there were people doing dumb shit like robbing shops, but still, many were innocent.

  After 2 or 3 days of violent clashes, of supermarkets being ransacked, of young people being arrested or killed in the streets, the young still stood their ground and kept protesting, kept evading, we kept rising our voices and pots, and the president had his best idea: For the first time since the end of the Pinochet’s dictatorship the Military forces where released onto the streets. Now it wasn’t only police men beating and shooting, it was soldiers. The president declared State of Emergency for the capital Santiago, for two other regions (Valparaíso and Concepción), and he declared those cities to be under curfew. After that, more regions where added to this list: Antofagasta, La Serena/Coquimbo, Valparaíso, Concepción and Santiago all under curfew.

But the biggest catalyst to this was that President Sebastián Piñera said: WE ARE AT WAR.

War... War? It may seem like it (just look at this), but is it really a war when we have pots and wooden spoons, and he has armed soldiers doing coke and other drugs in the streets before going to beat the hell out of people.

We are supposed to be living under a democracy and yet the president decided to pass the torch to General Javier Iturriaga del Campo, the one in charge of the state of emergency. Thanks to that decision we have soldiers and police men following and running people over with their cars, shooting to kill, people are being tortured in subway stations. People are being terrorized as if we where in a dictatorship once again. look at this image and tell me this is justice. Students are disappearing after being arrested. We are under curfew from 8p.m or 10p.m to 6a.m. But what happens to those who have no home to go back to? those who live under bridges? The soldiers beat the crap out of them. Police invading houses to arrest people, there where children there. Soldiers pointing their guns at firemen, firemen in Chile are volunteers, they don’t get paid, soldiers get paid at least $500.000 CLP.  In the last 24 hours the Chilean Army has spent $50 million pesos (68823.15 USD) to buy 56.725 anti-riot ammo. link.

We haven’t had any national transmissions with the president addressing this situation, only conferences. We’ve had congressmen say that games are plotting attacks while they play... Can ya’ll believe this shit?!

The biggest problem in all of this is that national channels censored everything, we where watching videos of soldiers hitting people, running people over, but the tv showed nothing. Just yesterday soldiers attacked a journalist even when he’d showed his safeguard to be on the street after curfew. News were being staged for outside countries: look at this video, the protestants are far away from where the cameras were rolling. Since last night there some sort of campaing to clean the image of the military men, showing them crying, dancing, and doing “silly” stuff with the people. And yes, there might be good cops/soldiers out there, but it does not erase the fact that two girls where raped by soldiers and that they still are killing and abusing people with brute force. Many civilians have plastic bullets in their bodies because soldier are shooting at close ranges. A young man lost an eye today in the morning after hours of surgery.

Many may be asking themselves: Why? Why haven’t they stopped if the president said he wouldn’t increase the public transport price?

Well, as someone said: They took so much from us, they even took our fear. It isn’t about public transport anymore. Its about the inequality of our economic system.

As a generation, from the kids born in the late 90′s to now, we have nothing. Most of us have absolutely nothing to loose but our lives.

We have no money. We can’t find jobs. We don’t have houses or cars. Those who do, either quit college to work or have almost no life because they work and study. Some are renting spaces smaller than tuna cans for the price of a kidney.

We own nothing, everything is under our parents names. People are in debt just to have something to eat. So of course we are not afraid of fighting against a system that favors the rich, a system that allows the already wealthy people to keep stealing what little is left in the pockets of the poor. We are fighting for the old, for the middle aged, for the ones who are yet to come. We don’t want to have children and eventually have to tell them “Find a job. ‘Cuz I can’t pay your education, I’m still paying mine”

Chile needs a change from the very core! we don’t need short term solutions. First of all the the government needs to be changed completely, every single parliamentarian. How much they earn needs to change. and because I read it, the major change that must be made is the constitution of Chile. A constitution that was written in times were the internet and technology was hard to come by, the Chilean constitution has not changed since the 80′s... A time when the dirty laundry of politicians could be easily brushed under the rug. The economic model need to change drastically.

Right now economic classes live segregated from one another. But for the first time in the history of Chile, every region has come together, there are no politic parties in the marches, there are no football teams, there’s no north or south or capitol, it’s just people fighting for their rights, marching to be heard, banging on pots and pans so the lies of the government can’t reach us anymore. Even with all the violence, all the oppression, there’s still hope, there are happy things going on in the protests. Soldiers playing with the protestants.

Please, inform yourselves on this, if you live in a capitalism model of economics, this could happen in your country too. 

Search for these hashtags: #estadodeemergencia #chile #milicos #pacos #carabinerosdechile #evasion #toquedequeda #santiago #laserena #concepcion #antofagasta #valparaiso . watch the videos, share them. Be the our voice outside our frontiers. 

WE ARE CALLING TO A WORLD WIDE MARCH THIS OCTOBER 24  AT 12.pm CHILEAN HOUR. HELP US, A BILLION VOICES UNITED FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE.

Feel free to add more videos, more proof.

Young People’s Participation and Social Transformative Potential

by Aliffa

When I entered college life, status as college student made me got additional privileges like golden ticket to attending seminar, event, competition, conference and to elevate my project. I also decide to delayed my graduation because I should finish my other competition research. But in the other side, young people decide to work full time after graduated from school. There is a lot reason why girl decide to work after graduated from school, most of all to contribute to the household economy. When other teenager girls decided to work, the probability to married may increase.

In fact, in teenage stage its normal when we consider put love life into bucket list, have boyfriend or put target when they were want to married. Based on Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five tier mode of human need. There are five stage model: Biological and Physiological, Safety needs, Love and Belongingness needs, Esteem needs, and Self-Actualization needs. Third level is love and belongingness needs. Love and belongingness need is stage where you need to communicate with other. In this context is your friend, your family and your intimate or sexual relationships. The point is need to have social interaction with other people. But I will highlight intimate or sexual relationships as a teenager. You are not definitely wrong if you on this need but I think it’s going to be worse if you stay longer, spend your time to focus on love life and make this stage as your life priority.

Feminist movement become one of solution to child marriage problem. Tom Cockburn wrote, feminist movement argued for a change in the relationship between men and women, the means for economic independence for women, and an improved educational provision for women and girls. Educational equality was seen by middle-class feminist to be a first step or key to other freedom, such as access to employment opportunities, and an increase ability to fight for other freedoms. Women agency in civil society and in relation to formal politics has in some cases been able to influence the discourse, politics of citizenship, improve women‘s civil, social and political rights’. In this respect women engage with social and political movement and organizations which are crucial for addressing exclusion and poverty in the community where self-help and voluntary organizations will act as buffers and shelters against market inequalities and welfare restructuring. But this concept would be complicated if implement in conservative culture. Feminist open up a bad impact to moral behavior. The sexual behavior of girls remained a social problem, and shaped the criminal justice system. Where there was a constant worry about girls’ sexual promiscuity.

“Today’s adolescents are uniquely positioned to unlock unprecedented economic growth in the world’s poorest countries. But if they enter this next chapter of their lives without the tools and support they need to protect their futures, there’s another scenario that could come to pass. The world could see a wave of teenage pregnancies with devastating costs.”- Melinda Gates

The average age of marriage in Indonesia is at the age of 22-25 years and lower than other countries. This will open up opportunities for high population growth if not accompanied by sufficient knowledge. Indonesia on seven place of the countries will have the world’s biggest populations in 2100 (UN, DESA, Population Division World Population Prospect, 2017) with 306 million, will add 43 million people to its population by the turn of the century. But how with government getting involved with this issue? The government still struggle with improve education, career development and the financial burdens in marriage life especially for women.

As college student, we got a lot privileges to expand our ability to face the future. I think, government and non-government need to consider to elevate all of citizen in social movement either technical skill as alternative to ignore increase girls to brides. Philippa Collin declared in his book Young Citizens and Political Participation in a Digital Society, young people rarely mentioned taking part in traditional political act such as voting, being a member of a political party or union without being prompted. But there was a common perception that young people were not taken seriously within government. Devoting time and resources to youth issues doesn’t seem to be something that governments really want to do, or will readily do. It’s all about diverting young people who are in trouble or are at risk away from courts. It’s not about engaging them before they get to that point. Because youth participation in policy is also shaped by economic and political forces.

Philippa Collin also declared, as regards policy development, government consult and outsource: inviting the non-government sector to advice on and then to deliver youth policy in the community. Labor governments have favored a more ‘enabling’ approach using a broader range of mechanism to involve a wider group of constituent to direct policy that is then delivered in various forms of ‘partnerships’ with non-state actors. Programmes delivering skill for ‘social action’ and ‘youth enterprise’ have also gain currency as alternative models for delivering on young women apparent desire to ‘create change’ in the community and a perceived need to equip young women with skills for self-management of the increasingly complex transitions through industrial revolution. Every young women as citizen deserve tools, education and support they need to protect their futures with focus participating in social action and youth enterprise.

References:

UN, DESA, Population Division World Population Prospect, 2017

https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

http://www.hipwee.com/wedding/cek-rata-rata-usia-menikah-di-15-negara-ini-kamu-termasuk-nikah-cepat-atau-telat-nih/

Philippa Collin. (2015). Young Citizens and Political Participation in a Digital Society_ Addressing the Democratic Disconnect. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 47-110.

Tom Cockburn. (2013). Rethinking Children’s Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 128.

When the Police Lie – The New York Times

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Good morning. Minneapolis plans to dismantle its police force. New York City is starting to reopen. And Tropical Storm Cristobal has made landfall. Let’s start with a look at false reports from the police.

An encounter in Buffalo last Thursday — in which two police officers shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground and left lying him there while blood poured out of his ear — was troubling partly because of the original police account.

The account claimed that the man “was injured when he tripped and fell.” If a video hadn’t existed, the truth might never have come out.

That’s a widespread problem:

Philip Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University, who has analyzed thousands of police reports, told CNN that lies like these were fairly common.

Activists in the current protest movement have begun to focus on how they can turn the rallies of the past 10 days into lasting change, to reduce both racism and police brutality. And reducing the frequency of false reports by the police is likely to be a key issue.

Already, reform-minded prosecutors and police chiefs have taken some steps in the last few years. The top prosecutor in St. Louis, Kim Gardner, has stopped accepting new cases or search warrant requests from officers with a history of misconduct or lies. In Philadelphia and Seattle, prosecutors are creating similar “do not call” lists, The Marshall Project has reported.

Chris Magnus, the police chief in Tucson, Ariz., told the Marshall Project: “If I had my way, officers who lie wouldn’t just be put on a list, they’d be fired, and also not allowed to work in any other jurisdiction as a police officer ever again.” Often, though, police-union contracts prevent firing even officers with a record of brutality and dishonesty — which then casts a shadow over the many police officers who tell the truth.

(The Times published an investigation this weekend, explaining how police unions have amassed political power and blocked change.)

False police reports are not a new problem. What’s new are the videos that have caused people to realize how common they are. “When I was a reporter, it was the police officer’s word against the victim’s or suspect’s,” Jamie Stockwell, a deputy national editor at The Times, told me. “Cellphone video has changed the debate over policing.”

THREE MORE BIG STORIES

1. Minneapolis to rethink policing

The Minneapolis City Council pledged yesterday to dismantle the Police Department. Council members said that they did not yet have specific plans for a new public safety system and would study models being tested in other cities.

It is the biggest response to the protests so far. In New York and Los Angeles, city officials have vowed to shrink police budgets in coming months.

In other protest developments:

2. New York emerges from its virus lockdown

New York City will take the first steps toward reopening today, a moment of optimism in a city battered by the coronavirus. Nonessential construction and manufacturing can resume, and retail stores can open for pickup. As many as 400,000 workers could return to their jobs.

The milestone comes 100 days after the city reported its first case. Since then, more than 211,000 residents have been infected and more than 21,000 have died. The confirmed infection rate has dropped sharply since the peak in mid-April.

In other virus developments:

3. Distance learning isn’t working

Education experts believe that distance learning in most school districts is not working and that students are falling behind at alarming rates. “We know this isn’t a good way to teach,” a seventh-grade teacher in Colorado said. Black, Hispanic and low-income students are falling behind the fastest, research suggests.

“The richest and poorest parents are spending about the same amount of hours on remote school,” Dana Goldstein, a Times reporter who has written a book on teaching, told us. But “wealthier parents are inevitably able to provide more books and supplies at home, more quiet space, educational toys and often more knowledge of the curriculum.” More high-income school districts are also providing strong remote instruction, rather than basic worksheet-like activities.

Here’s what else is happening

Tropical Storm Cristobal made landfall in southeast Louisiana yesterday, hours after pouring several inches of rain on the New Orleans area. The storm is expected to head north to Arkansas and Missouri by Tuesday.

James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The Times, has resigned over the publication of an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton last week that called for the military to crack down on “lawbreakers” in the protests. (Ben Smith, The Times’s media columnist, looked at the revolts inside the country’s big newsrooms.)

Lives lived: It was the late 1970s, and the hip-hop scene was just emerging. Robert Ford Jr., better known as Rocky, was there to chronicle it as a journalist and then promote it as a producer and mentor to early stars like Kurtis Blow. Ford’s breakout record? A Christmas single. He has died at 70.

BACK STORY: Taking a knee

Four years ago, Kurt Streeter — then an ESPN writer — published a profile of Nate Boyer, an unusual football player. Boyer was homeless as a young man and later served in the Army as a Green Beret, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. For the Seattle Seahawks, he was the long-snapper, who played only on some kicks.

Boyer’s place in football history, however, won’t be about what he did on the field. It will be about the fact that he gave Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid the idea to protest police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. Boyer, who’s white, said he would never kneel during the anthem. But he thought it was a symbol of reverence and had seen a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. protesting in Alabama by kneeling.

“If you’re not going to stand,” Boyer remembers telling Kaepernick and Reid, as the three of them sat in a hotel lobby, hours before a game in 2016, “I’d say your only other option is to take a knee.”

Kurt has since left ESPN for The Times, and he has written an article about how kneeling spread from the N.F.L. to the recent protests. Boyer’s comments are a fascinating part of the story — and a reminder of why journalists often make an effort to keep in touch with people they’ve interviewed.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, FREEZE

Make sorbet

All you need is a tin of fruit and a food processor to create a refreshing summer treat: sorbet in an instant.

Some tips: Choose fruits in heavy syrup, and make sure they are pitted and seedless. You can also add a liqueur or other spirit, such as Campari (with frozen grapefruit) or tequila (with lime juice with oranges). Find more flavor combinations here.

A roadblock for baseball’s comeback

As sports leagues around the world finalize plans to return, Major League Baseball still has not. Owners have asked players to take a second pay cut — not only to reflect a shorter season but also for less money per game — and the players have said no. The two sides are so far apart that it’s possible there may not be baseball until next spring.

And in basketball … One thing to watch when the N.B.A. resumes play July 31: Will Zion Williamson, the league’s most exciting rookie, help his New Orleans Pelicans make a late run to the playoffs?

See something moving

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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Trump Threw Weighty Refugee Decisions to Local Government, With Painful Results

EAST LONGMEADOW, Mass. — In a gray-walled, institutional hall usually reserved for prosaic debates over traffic and town budgets, Mohamoud Abdirahman rose from the audience last month and approached a panel of five town councilmen sitting in judgment.

Civil war had forced his family to flee their native Somalia in 1991, when he was a child. The Abdirahmans traveled for two days by cargo ship to Kenya, where they stayed for a year and a half before securing refuge in the United States. Now, it was his turn to fight for those trying to follow his footsteps to this town abutting Springfield and the Connecticut border.

“A lot of people like me just want a second chance at life,” an emotional Mr. Abdirahman pleaded.

A similar refrain is echoing across the country in town councils, county commissions, mayors’ offices and governors’ mansions after an executive order signed by President Trump in September granted local politicians a veto over the placement of refugees in their communities.

That order has carried the national tension over the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda from the halls of Washington and detention camps along the southwestern border to places like East Longmeadow, population 16,000, and turned refugees and those who work to resettle them into lobbyists of sorts.

The anxiety among resettlement officials here has grown in recent weeks after the mayor of neighboring Springfield, one of the largest cities in Western Massachusetts, became one of the first politicians in the country to announce that he would not allow refugee resettlement. That was amplified by the decision of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas last month to block resettlement for the entire state, which has welcomed more refugees than any other state in the past five years. And on Friday, Mr. Trump put refugees who have lived in Western Massachusetts for years at risk of continuing to stay separated from their relatives abroad when he added Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and Tanzania to a list of countries facing stringent travel restrictions.

“This goes against everything we know,” said Maxine Stein, the chief executive of the Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, a refugee resettlement agency.

The vetoes issued so far in Texas, Springfield and counties in Minnesota and Virginia were suspended in recent weeks by a federal judge who issued a temporary injunction against the executive order. The ruling delayed a Jan. 21 deadline for resettlement agencies to submit funding requests — along with letters of consent from governors and local officials — to the State Department.

But the resettlement agencies say there is still an urgent need for the resettlement approvals. Judges issued similar temporary injunctions for Mr. Trump’s other immigration polices, only to have the Supreme Court side with the administration.

It is also, the resettlement agencies say, about education. Some local officials were wholly unfamiliar with refugee policy before Mr. Trump tasked them with deciding whether resettlement should continue in their communities. Under the executive order, if a town board, county official or mayor declines — or neglects — to make a decision, silence equates to a veto.

“What we’ve seen in the courts is that the deadline may be pushed back, but it often doesn’t go away,” said Sara Bedford, who works with refugee families for the Jewish Family Service. “As long as the Springfield mayor doesn’t opt in, I think refugee communities will feel just a little bit less welcome.”

The vague wording of the executive order also caused confusion among refugee resettlement officials, who questioned which local official had the power to consent to the State Department.

Under the order, consent is required from governors and “localities,” which in many places was interpreted as the county leadership. But some Western Massachusetts towns are not represented by a county government, so the decision in Springfield fell to Domenic J. Sarno, the son of Italian immigrants and the longest-serving mayor of one of the poorest cities in the state.

Mr. Sarno, a Democrat, issued his veto even after Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts formally consented to allow refugees into the state and the Springfield City Council unanimously voted to allow them into the city.

“You cannot continue to concentrate poverty on top of poverty,” Mr. Sarno wrote in Springfield’s newspaper, The Republican. He demanded that more affluent communities “step up to the plate and put their money where their mouth is — to take on their fair share of social justice responsibilities.”

Mr. Sarno’s words echoed those of Mr. Trump, who has said the country is “full” and has threatened to send immigrants by the busload to Democratic cities and towns that have denounced his policies. Michael A. Fenton, the Springfield councilman who introduced the resolution to welcome refugees, said he had been fielding calls from residents demanding the city “let them go to the suburbs.” Mr. Abbott argued, “Texas has carried more than its share.”

But most government officials who responded to the executive order have decided to accept refugees into their states and counties, including those dominated by Republicans. At least 42 governors and more than 110 local governments have consented.

They include Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas and former under secretary of homeland security, who in 2015 opposed allowing Syrian refugees into the state, citing security concerns. Last month, Mr. Hutchinson testified before his State Legislature to defend allowing refugees into Arkansas, taking with him a Congolese business owner and an Afghan refugee who assisted the American military.

Gary Stubblefield, an Arkansas state senator, pressed his fellow Republican, lamenting, “Every morning when I wake up and turn on the national news, sometimes I ask myself a question: ‘Am I still in the United States of America?’”

Mr. Hutchinson held his ground: “You’ve got a choice to make. You can create fear, or you can help resolve fear. I challenge you to help resolve fear.”

In a twist, Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview that he was encouraged to allow refugees into Arkansas since a limited number would most likely be resettled in the state after Mr. Trump capped the number for 2020 at 18,000, down from 30,000 in the previous year. President Barack Obama set the cap at 110,000 his last year in office.

Still, Mr. Hutchinson’s staff spent the first days after his decision fielding angry calls from constituents, an uncomfortable task that Mr. Fenton in Springfield knows well. By signing the executive order, Mr. Trump has put municipal leaders in an unfair position, Mr. Fenton said.

“Municipal officials in the Northeast, we deal with snow, we deal with potholes, we deal with property taxes, trash pickup,” he said. “We do not deal with the complications associated with refugee immigration policy.”

He worries that the mayor’s decision will have a lasting effect on Springfield’s reputation.

“Those active and contributing members of our society don’t feel good about themselves in the place that they live when people say they’re not welcome,” Mr. Fenton said.

Mr. Sarno’s rejection of refugees surprised Fikiri Amisi and Jacqueline Asumani, Congolese immigrants who came to Springfield last year after spending more than 12 years in a refugee camp in Zimbabwe. When he first came to Springfield, Mr. Amisi said, it felt as though he had been saved. Both work full time, Ms. Asumani at a hotel and Mr. Amisi at a factory that manufactures medical supplies. Mr. Amisi is also studying for his associate degree. They have three children and plan to buy a house next year.

The couple wonders what they have done wrong.

“They don’t want more refugees here,” Ms. Asumani told her husband. “It shows they don’t love us.”

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Amisi looked through a photo album and stopped at an image showing the refugee camp where he used to wait in limbo. A friend called him to express concern over the mayor’s decision. He has been waiting for a ticket to the United States for four years, though long ago he cleared the refugee screening process.

The resettlement officials at Jewish Family Service have tried to meet with officials on a near daily basis. Municipal leaders often ask about costs to the school system and whether the local government will need to provide housing for the refugees. The staff reassures them that the onus is on the resettlement agency, which helps families find work and pay for the first three months of housing.

While a veto by a local official cannot prevent a refugee from moving to a city from within the United States, it prohibits the resettlement organizations from providing that initial financial support and could harm their overall funding, according to Ms. Stein.

“When you’re sleeping on relatives’ floors or extra beds, and you’re all jammed into the kitchen, and it’s chaotic in the morning to get to school so you just don’t get to school, it’s just not a good scene,” Ms. Stein said.

She made that case to the East Longmeadow Town Council, hoping councilors would open the door to refugees shut out of Springfield. Some seemed moved by the testimonies, including the story of Mr. Abdirahman, who now holds a master’s degree and works as the assistant director of behavioral health services at Jewish Family Service.

“To our residents who took the time to speak from your heart, thank you for doing that,” said Kathleen G. Hill, the Town Council president. “And come visit anytime.”

But the Council already voted to take no action on Mr. Trump’s executive order in November, weeks after it was signed. Local government rules stipulated that they could not take the matter up for another six months.

Their hands were tied. And under Mr. Trump’s policy, doing nothing meant turning the refugees away.

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The Destination and Journey & Contingency Management Group Work Responses

GROUP WORK

Process Journal: The Destination and Journey. (group)

Review and select a subject matter that you anticipate will contain a problem to solve. Provide a rationale why you should be part of the team, outlining your interest, expertise and contributions. You will work with a team, throughout the remainder of the course, to collectively and collaboratively work through the stages of the creative problem-solving process. Each team member should post a copy of this document to their process journal.

The problem we are trying to solve is the issue of poverty. This problem will not have a black-and-white solution, so we're accepting the challenge to reduce the levels of poverty the best we can.

Michelle: I would be able to contribute to the team through my background in mathematics. Math opens up all kinds of avenues for change, like potentially developing a new global economic model that's backed by data and evidence. My personal interests in participating with the topic of poverty involve ethical motivation, intrinsic value in helping others, and being a great role model, influence, and a contagious proponent of change.

Amelia: I think I will be able to contribute my passion for the homelessness crisis in LA and California at large. It has been something I have been very interested in fixing for many years. I have volunteered with various organizations and I have become very educated on the issues and steps that are being taken to solve the issue in innovative ways. I have been very interested in coming up with my own creative ways to tackle this problem. I am currently working on my own clothing line whose socially responsible aspect will be helping women transition out of homelessness through donations to the Downtown Women’s Center. I have a huge motivation to extensively research the problem and learn as much as I can. Overall, I think my passion for this specific issue will push me to get as creative as possible and work very hard for my team.

Penny: I moved to Orange County, CA in 2008 and in the last 11 years I’ve witnessed an increase in homelessness in southern California alone. Last year, Santa Ana Riverbed was overcrowded with homeless encamps and the solutions to migrate them we’re not effective. Moving them from one location to another is not a solution. Not only am I living a few miles away from these issues, I see homeless people every day at my work. They are unable to afford the current housing market as well as having a hard time finding a job in this competitive world. My passion is to help people in any aspect I can. My strength is in design and marketing, and I have always been good at developing and implementing projects from start to finish. I hope that by solving this issue locally, we can implement this solution globally.

Process Journal: Contingency Management. (group)

Create a new post in your process journal and identify the project’s contingencies, real or imaginary, that may impede progress, that seems outside of your control, and or issues that need to be resolved before you can move forward. 

Amelia: I think bureaucratic issues could get in the way because there are a lot of laws and rules surrounding the homeless. It could be difficult to implement certain things because of these rules. For example, creating mobile homeless shelters is a big issue because the police will just confiscate them because they can be a fire hazard. We need to be aware of different city rules so we can come up with solutions that can actually help. Another contingency could be working with individuals with drug addiction and mental health problems. We would need to find people who are properly equipped to help with these individuals so they can get the proper care. Lastly, just the sheer size of the homeless population is something we cannot control. We have to tackle it on a very small level, see if what we implement works then take it larger scale.

Penny: I think the hardest part about tackling poverty is that poverty is seen at different levels geographically, and different countries and cities have their own laws and policies. One would tackle the issues with poverty in a third world country is much different than tackling poverty issues in a first world country. Even poverty issues are different city to city. Some laws and policies are in favor of the poor but not poorest of the poor. Other tough parts to crack are the economic systems and health systems that are currently in place that is not considerate of the poor. Moreover, other countries just simply don't have clean water and other basic resources. We need to identify what levels of poverty there are and which are the ones we can possibly solve.

Michelle: I think it’s extremely important to keep in mind that the problem of “poverty” has countless moving parts and it’s impossible to find a single solution to solve all of them simultaneously. A potential approach would be to work on a few of these where a solution to those may also knock out a few others. After we’ve got a tried-and-true solution on a smaller scale, it’d be great to scale it up or try it in other countries too. Developing a plan to tackle poverty may also need to address the following causes and/or effects of poverty (not an exhaustive list):

- Human greed - Belief that your life is worth more than another’s

- Stubbornness, laziness - Assumption that nothing you'll do will actually make a difference in someone else's life

- Generational influence - someone is born into poverty

- Because of parents’ situation, can ruin kids’ changes pretty harshly

- Disabilities/injuries - Found anecdote online: “Health issues and a social structure that incentives me to collect SSDI for my disabilities rather than provide me with worthwhile gainful and sustainable opportunities and employment protection. It also incentivizes me to never have more than $1,800 in the bank. I either have to be poor or phenomenally successful to deal with my medical bills.”

- Bills, debt, loans, credit cards, Student debt, Bankruptcy

- Irresponsible choices, overspending

- Mental issues

- Terrible relationships

- Can incur debt

- Divorces

- Dropped out of school

- Ran away from home

- Having kids young or before financially stable/can afford them

- Really bad timing

- Lots of things happen at once, like car repairs, house repairs, medical

- Natural disasters

- War

- “I still consider myself in poverty even though I have a job and make a decent salary” type of mindsets

Respond individually at first, and then share and discuss with your team the following “behavioral modifications” or rules of engagement: Understand your limits. what are your capabilities and the collective capabilities of your team?

- We all have a similar passion to genuinely help people, not just “bandaid” fix

- Between the three of us, we have personal experience of proximity to poverty, volunteering

- We may not have a perfect understanding of the economies of the world, but we can research & develop an improved (potentially global) version

- We have access to health system policies

- We have a lot of creative ideas!!

Establish reasonable and feasible goals and standards. What are your and your team’s intentions and are they in line with your abilities. Where does your team have gaps and how will you mitigate that?

- We all have the same intentions -- having the desire to help others.

- We agree we’ll keep each other accountable to keep our goals, standards, and abilities in line.

Be strict and consistent. Do not promise what you cannot deliver. Talk with your team on how to stay within scope and meet and exceed expectations with within your collective means.

- We’ll brainstorm, communicate, and evaluate about our ideas, and decide together which direction to move forward in. We’ll test and spread our ideas on crowdfunding sources and/or fundraising events.

Reward yourself. What incentives do you and your team value when you meet your goals and, conversely, what is agreed upon and accepted “consequences” for you or your team members not contributing or behaving poorly?

- If we release something at the end of our project, we’ll have a launch party!

- Feel good at the heart that we accomplished something good.