By Keri Leigh Merritt/BillMoyers.com

Since before the election, poor white voters largely have been blamed for the rise of Donald Trump. Although their complicity in his election is clear and well established, they’re continually targeted as if their actions are the primary reason Trump won. But in fact, higher-earning, college-educated whites supported him at even greater rates.
It’s quite easy to brand the working class as the most rabidly xenophobic and racist group of whites. Whether they’re brandishing Confederate flags or vociferously vowing to “Make America Great Again,” their beliefs about white supremacy are completely exposed for the world to witness. It’s much harder to see how those atop the economic pyramid not only greatly benefit from white supremacy but actually use racism to their advantage – generally from behind the scenes.
In short, when we hold the working class responsible for white supremacy, other whites are absolved of racial wrongdoing. By allowing the spread of civic ignorance, by propagating historical lies and political untruths, and by engendering an insidious form of racism, upper class whites are undoubtedly just as culpable – if not more so – than working class whites in the quest to maintain white supremacy.

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Posted on August 14, 2017

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

New Orleans native Elizabeth Thomas will attend Georgetown University this fall as a legacy student – of sorts.
Georgetown granted Thomas preferential admission because of her family’s historic connection to the university.
Almost 200 years earlier, the college’s president sold Thomas’s great-great grandparents Sam Harris and Betsy Ware Harris, along with 62 other slaves, to help pay off crippling debts.
As part of a new program to make amends for its historical reliance on slavery, Georgetown now extends preferential admission to the descendants of the 272 individuals it sold over time, acknowledging the burdens caused by slavery, segregation and discrimination.

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Posted on August 8, 2017

By Josh Hoxie/Common Dreams

Work hard and you’ll get ahead – that’s the mantra driven into young people across the country.
But what happens when children born into poverty run face first into the crushing reality that the society they live in really isn’t that fair at all?
As new research shows, they break down.
A just released study published in the journal Child Development tracked the middle-school experience of a group of diverse, low-income students in Arizona. The study found that the kids who believed society was generally fair typically had high self-esteem, good classroom behavior, and less delinquent behavior outside of school when they showed up in the sixth grade.
When those same kids left in the eighth grade, though, each of those criteria had degraded – they showed lower self-esteem and worse behavior.
What caused this downward slide?
In short, belief in a fair and just system of returns ran head-on into reality for marginalized kids. When they see people that look like them struggling despite working hard, they’re forced to reckon with the cognitive dissonance.

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Posted on August 4, 2017

Multiple Lies In A Single Debate Answer

File under Reminder.

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Posted on August 3, 2017

By The AAAN

Under Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, Chicago police officers can hold certain immigrants past their release date in response to detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Chicago maintains this practice of jailing immigrants beyond the time when they would ordinarily be released even though courts around the country have ruled such holds unconstitutional. Most recently, on Monday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that local law enforcement officials, such as police officers, do not have the authority to hold individuals based on immigration detainer requests.

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Posted on July 26, 2017

By John Light/BillMoyers.com

In 2016, CEOs at America’s largest firms made, on average, 271 times more than the average US worker. Fifty years ago, that ratio was 20-to-1.
The CEO-to-worker pay ratio, calculated annually by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, has narrowed slightly in recent years; in 2014, it was 299-to-1. But it has grown by an order of magnitude since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping data in the 1960s, and has even doubled many times over since the late 1980s, when it was 59-to-1.

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Posted on July 25, 2017

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

While the Senate GOP’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act has been denounced as potentially devastating to the poor, the sick, women, people of color, children and those with pre-existing conditions, a new analysis published Monday finds that no matter what happens, the CEOs of large healthcare companies are likely to continue living lavishly.
Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, the “CEOs of 70 of the largest U.S. healthcare companies cumulatively have earned $9.8 billion,” according to Axios’s Bob Herman.
Herman goes on to add that the CEOs’ earnings “far outstrip[ped] the wage growth of nearly all Americans.”
“The richest year [for healthcare CEOs] was 2015, when 70 healthcare CEOs collectively made $2 billion,” Herman notes. “That was an average of about $28.5 million per CEO and a median of about $17.3 million per CEO. The median household income in 2015 was $56,515, which the average healthcare CEO made in less than a day.”

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Posted on July 25, 2017

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

Though an explosive interview with President Donald Trump conducted by the New York Times published Wednesday evening resulted in breaking news bulletins across the media and provided an inside look at Trump’s state of mind regarding current events, including health care, some in the journalistic community are expressing disappointment at the lack of substantive questions asked of the president – adding to growing concern about how the press engages with the current White House.
Allowed to ramble on in vague terms about health care policies he appears to know little about, the three interviewers were faulted for not holding Trump to account regarding specific aspects of the various proposals or the ongoing failure of Republicans in the Senate.

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Posted on July 24, 2017

By Brian Levin/The Conversation

Hate crimes against Muslims have been on the rise. The murder of two samaritans for aiding two young women who were facing a barrage of anti-Muslim slurs on a Portland train is among the latest examples of brazen acts of anti-Islamic hatred.
Earlier in 2017, a mosque in Victoria, Texas was burned to the ground by an alleged anti-Muslim bigot.
And just last year, members of a small extremist group called “The Crusaders” plotted a bombing “bloodbath” at a residential housing complex for Somali-Muslim immigrants in Garden City, Kansas.
I have analyzed hate crime for two decades at California State University-San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. And I have found that the rhetoric politicians use after terrorist attacks is correlated closely to sharp increases and decreases in hate crimes.

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Posted on July 20, 2017

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

No, in turns out, the United States does not have the “best healthcare system in the world.”
In the midst of a deeply unpopular attempt by the Republican Party to pass legislation that could leave 22 million more Americans uninsured and as support for Medicare for All soars, a new analysis published on Friday by the Washington-based Commonwealth Fund finds that the U.S. healthcare system currently ranks last among 11 other advanced countries in healthcare outcomes, access, equity, and efficiency.
The U.S. “fell short” in almost every domain measured, the Commonwealth Fund’s senior vice president for policy and research Eric Schneider, M.D., told the New Scientist.

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Posted on July 17, 2017