Government
OP-ED: This Government Shutdown is Destroying America
HOUSTON FORWARD TIMES — As a result of this catastrophic and life-altering shutdown, so many people who have relied on the government for their livelihood have been severely impacted in a major way.
Imagine having to choose between paying your mortgage and picking up the much-needed prescription you need for your health crisis, because the job you report to and the federal resources you have relied on to live day to day are no longer available to you because of things beyond your control.
Choices like that, and many others, have been exactly what the approximately 800,000 federal workers, the roughly 4 million contractors and the countless number of low-income families who rely on the federal government, have had to deal with since the beginning of what has become the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. This has been the third shutdown of the federal government since President Donald J. Trump took the oath of office.
As a result of this catastrophic and life-altering shutdown, so many people who have relied on the government for their livelihood have been severely impacted in a major way.
People have had their Medicare and Medicaid disrupted. The stock market has been volatile. Federal workers have gone without paychecks and are in danger of losing everything they have worked so hard to attain to live the American dream. Safety has also become an issue.
Our food is not safe. As a result of the shutdown, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) immediately announced that most they had stopped most of their routine food safety inspections because staff had been working without pay. These inspections handled by the unpaid workers included things like doing safety inspections on foods that had been imported from overseas, dangerous recalls, foodborne illness outbreaks, and much more.
Our drugs are not safe. The FDA also stated that because of the shutdown, they don’t have the ability to review new drugs that could be beneficial in helping people get better until the government reopens.
Even our airports are not safe.
Just a few weeks ago, a passenger on Delta Air Lines who was traveling from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta to Tokyo, Japan, informed authorities that he had inadvertently carried his loaded firearm through airport security and onto the plane. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confirmed this and there are more concerns that unpaid TSA workers may not have the same level of focus due to the non-pay and many are not even reporting to work. Just this past week, the TSA checkpoint in Terminal B at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston was closed due to TSA agents calling in sick to protest the shutdown. Things are getting more and more out of hand.
On top of the potential safety issues, the financial strain this shutdown is putting on the American people, especially here in Texas is devastating.
This government shutdown will impact more than 3.5 million Texans who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits come February 2019.
SNAP offers nutrition assistance to millions of eligible, low-income individuals and families and provides economic benefits to communities. SNAP is the largest program in the domestic hunger safety net. According to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, there are currently 3,580,375 people receiving SNAP benefits as of December 2018.
Texas State Senator Borris L. Miles states that while the shutdown is already hurting Texans all across the state, he believes it’s about to hit the poorest in our communities the hardest because after February 2019, SNAP beneficiaries will no longer receive the necessary funds to purchase food.
“This is unacceptable,” said Miles. “I am calling on the Texas leadership to make emergency preparations to help Texans on food stamps and other programs impacted by the shutdown. I am prepared to roll up my sleeves and work with my colleagues to ensure we fund these programs adequately so that no Texan should go hungry.”
Senator Miles also sent a joint letter to President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to make it clear that Texas is prepared to help those impacted in our state and expects to be reimbursed when the federal government reopens.
“This is not a Democratic or Republican issue, or a rural, urban or suburban issue; it’s a poor people issue,” said Miles. “We need to do the right thing, help the poorest in our communities and minimize the impact of this shutdown.”
It has been unconscionable to witness the very people who have been elected to represent the American people, turn around and allow personal politics and political ideologies to severely hurt the American people after being voted to represent them as advocates, not enemies.
The longer this government shutdown continues, the more the American people will suffer and America as a whole will be at risk.
The American people must demand more from the elected officials who have been voted in to represent them and let them know that things have gone too far and must stop.
To hold the country hostage because President Trump can’t get his beloved wall across the border, when he stated from the onset that he would make the country of Mexico pay for it, is unfair and disingenuous. Subsequently, any elected official who cosigns with this mode of thinking and action is equally as irresponsible.
It is time for all elected officials to stop playing chicken with the American people’s livelihoods and stop playing the role of elected enemies to the people they are elected to serve.
This article originally appeared in the Houston Forward Times.
Activism
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club
Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”
By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”
Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.
Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”
Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.
“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”
On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”
He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.
Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”
With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”
He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”
Activism
MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System
Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.
Special to The Post
When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.
Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.
A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.
Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.
Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.
This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.
After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.
Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.
CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.
In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.
These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.
She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.
Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.
Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.
By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.
Activism
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