By UIC

Two new studies published by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago provide evidence that public policies to reduce consumption of added sugars through taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages are effective and sustainable.
Sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, juice, and energy and sports drinks, are the largest contributor of added sugars in American diets. Overconsumption of added sugars significantly contributes to obesity and is associated with comorbidities like diabetes, which can increase cancer risks and result in more severe COVID-19 illness. Currently, more than 50% of adults and 65% of children consume more added sugars than recommended.
Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, often called soda taxes, aim to provide financial incentives to consumers choosing healthier beverages while also funding public health programs.

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Posted on December 4, 2021

By Stella Levantesi and Giulio Corsi/DeSmog

When fossil fuel companies found out about the link between their product and climate change decades ago, they did everything they could to hide it. They lied, manipulated, and deceived.
Today, denying the reality of climate change isn’t as easy, and it is certainly more controversial. But that doesn’t mean climate deniers – fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, and their allies opposed to climate action – have moved past the lies.
As catastrophic fires spread across the world and large swaths of land are flooded by extreme weather events or threatened by sea-level rise, outright denial is no longer the most effective strategy, or these days, the most common.
To better understand today’s type of climate science denial, we analyzed over 300,000 tweets from the past five years. Our social media analysis found that climate deniers have been promoting at least four major narratives based on drumming up fears of government control in order to prevent effective climate policies, particularly in the United States.

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Posted on November 20, 2021

By The Obama CBA Coalition

Over 70 residents and press gathered in South Shore on Sunday for the announcement of policy demands to protect renters and homeowners in South Shore. See below for the six demands and how they can be implemented. Download the one-pager and comprehensive details on the demands. A virtual event to teach about the demands is scheduled for Wednesday, December 1 at 6 p.m. – RSVP for the Zoom link here.
Construction of the Obama Presidential Center broke ground on September 28, 2021. Blocks away in South Shore, where the majority of residents are low-income Black people, longtime tenants and homeowners are being displaced, and affordable housing is disappearing. South Shore is the #1 neighborhood for eviction filings in 2021. South Shore is 93% Black, and 77% of residents are renters. Over half of South Shore residents are rent burdened (spending more than 30% of income on rent). Meanwhile, property values in South Shore have increased by 48% in the past year (Oct ’20-’21). [sources: Census 2021; Redfin]

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Posted on November 15, 2021

By William Winter/OtherWords

There are many ways in which the United States is not one country.
I’m not referring to red states versus blue states, or racial or ethnic divisions. What I mean is that the United States, where countless corrupt billionaires and dictators have stashed their loot, is not a single tax haven, but many separate tax havens.

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Posted on November 4, 2021

By The American Psychological Association

As the population of people of color grows across the United States, white Americans are still prone to move when neighborhoods diversify, and their fears and stereotypical beliefs about other racial and ethnic groups may help maintain segregation, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
In a nationally representative survey and six additional studies, white Americans perceived a threat to their culture and way of life when presented with information about changing demographics in hypothetical white-majority neighborhoods and schools, compared with when no demographic change was projected. The projected population growth of Arab Americans, Latino Americans and Asian Americans evoked the strongest feelings of foreign cultural threat, followed by the projected population growth of Black Americans. The research was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

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Posted on October 27, 2021

By Lynn Parramore/Common Dreams

The emergency room. You go there for help when you’re really in trouble or have no place else to turn. But who decides what happens to you there? If you think the answer is doctors, think again. Large corporations are increasingly taking over these centers of life and death, and they are focused far less on your health than squeezing as much profit from your situation as possible.
That’s why a growing chorus of physicians, advocates and patients is sounding the alarm on what they say is a corporate-fueled catastrophe in the making. The pandemic, they warn, has amplified problems rampant in a healthcare system managed not for the benefit of human lives but for the corporations and elite executives who control it. This path, they warn, is both unsustainable and dangerous.
Ground zero for the newest form of greed-driven medicine is hospital emergency rooms.

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Posted on October 24, 2021

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

More than two years after the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) promised a federal court that it would improve health care for those detained in their facilities, the department has failed the fundamental task of creating a plan for making necessary changes. That is the finding contained in a report last week by a court-appointed expert with the federal court.
Dr. John Raba, who serves as the independent, court-appointed monitor in Lippert v. Jeffreys, made the point in the report, writing, “IDOC does not yet have a comprehensive plan to address this Consent Decree; instead, it seems to primarily respond to crises and threats of legal action.”
The report is the latest development in the case that was settled in January 2019.

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Posted on October 23, 2021

By Francine Townsend/Other Words

For the last 20 years, I have lived and thrived in a mobile home community. I loved where I live – right up until Wall Street bought the park and threatened the well-being of myself, my neighbors, and my family.
Mobile homes are a vital source of affordable housing for around 3 million households across 45,000 communities in the United States. These households have a median income of about $36,000, and include vulnerable populations like seniors, the disabled and immigrants.
Our mobile home community was the sort of place where every neighbor helped everybody. If my grass wasn’t cut, the neighbor across the street would cut it. If their grass didn’t get cut that week, I would take care of it. That’s just how we were.
But things started to get harder in 2012, when RHP Properties – a corporation entwined with Brookfield Asset Management, a Toronto-based private equity firm – took ownership of our mobile home community in Spring Valley, New York.

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Posted on October 13, 2021

By Abby Zimet/Common Dreams

From Minneapolis, a too-common tale of racist, brutal, corrupt policing in America. On the night of May 30, 2020, five days after George Floyd’s public execution, with the city under curfew and BLM protests raging, a heavily armed SWAT team of Minneapolis cops in helmets and tactical vests set out in an unmarked, unlit, white van with up to 20 police cars trailing behind them; a SWAT member later likened the van to “the tip of a spear.”
In the words of a police report, the team was “patrolling” to “control the crowds that were causing severe property damage” in the wake of Floyd’s murder. In English, that translated into slowly creeping down a largely quiet street to terrorize random pedestrians, Taliban-like, by shooting them without warning with rubber bullets or 40mm launchers from the van’s open sliding door; they also sometimes yelled, “Go home!”
In later court testimony, they acknowledged the shootings as “pain compliance;” in later body-cam footage, their ugly mood was clear. In the van, Sgt. Andrew Bittell orders his team, “You see a group, call it out. Fuck ’em up, gas ’em, fuck ’em up . . . The first fuckers we see, we’re just hammering ’em with 40s.”

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Posted on October 11, 2021

By The Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers

The Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers have released a report that catalogs 10 data-based facts about the Cook County Sheriff’s Electronic Monitoring (EM) Program to help the public understand the breadth of this program, who exactly is affected, and to make a determination as to whether it is worth the millions of dollars taxpayers spend each year to maintain it.
The report is a comprehensive analysis of public data from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) obtained through public sources, such as the CCSO’s website, and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. Our analysis examines who is confined, why they are confined, for how long, and whether they are rearrested while on electronic monitoring. Full documentation and code used to generate the analysis in this report can be found here.

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Posted on September 23, 2021