Posts tagged with 'Georgia'
Weekly Pulse: The Republicans’ War On Women
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
The entire federal government might shut down over birth control. Yes, birth control. This special edition of the Pulse is about the ongoing war against women being waged in Congress and in state legislatures nationwide.
Cutting birth control
Last Friday, the House voted to amend the continuing resolution to fund the federal government to defund the $317 million Title X Family Planning Program, a major beneficiary of which is Planned Parenthood. None of this money funds abortions. Instead, it goes to birth control, cancer screenings, and other reproductive health services for 5 million low-income Americans.
This kind of preventive care is highly cost-effective. Every federal family planning dollar saves an estimated $4 tax dollars on unintended pregnancy costs alone. Saving money by de-funding contraception is like “saving money” by not paying your rent. It’s not savings if you end up staying in a hotel that costs even more.
As Nick Baumann reports for Mother Jones, Senate Democrats are confident that they can defeat the measure. However, if that happens and the House Republicans won’t pass an acceptable alternative, the federal government will run out of money and shut down until the impasse is resolved. (more…)
Weekly Diaspora: Schools a Minefield for Undocumented Students After DREAM defeat
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
It’s no secret that anti-immigrant activists have a penchant for targeting youth, the most vulnerable of the undocumented set. But the Senate defeat of the popular DREAM Act confirmed the obvious. The war on immigrants is being waged not only along our borders, but within our classrooms as well.
But depriving undocumented students with a pathway to citizenship clearly wasn’t enough. From coast to coast, anti-immigrant forces are trying to block undocumented students from attending college, keep Latino teens from learning about their cultural heritage, and stop immigrant children from knowing their rights.
Undocumented students need not apply
Georgia has become the latest state to consider banning undocumented students from college. While no federal laws prohibit undocumented youth from pursuing higher education, a number of states—like Arizona—have attempted to block access to college by denying in-state tuition and publicly funded scholarships. Georgia, however, is among the first to attempt an outright ban on undocumented students.
According to Prerna Lal at Change.org, North Carolina community colleges tried to implement a similar ban last year, but repealed it after realizing the law was causing the schools to lose money. Wary of meeting the same fate, Georgia colleges—including University of Georgia and Georgia Tech—are thinking about a more measured policy that would ban undocumented students only if schools lacked the space to admit all qualified candidates. Lal notes that such a policy would serve political rather than practical ends, as undocumented students make up less than one percent of Georgia college’s 310,000 students.
Ethnic studies are un-American?
Meanwhile, in Arizona, students of all ages are facing an uphill battle for ethnic studies curricula. A controversial law signed by Governor Jan Brewer (R) last May threatens to abolish a variety of ethnic-based academic programs by the end of the year. The law, which makes exceptions for Holocaust, African-American, and American Indian studies, seems to specifically target Raza Studies—a program that promotes Mesoamerican history, culture, and pedagogies.
Roberto Rodriguez at New America Media reports that school districts are standing against the law and in support of the Raza Studies program which is proven to positively impact student success:
The consensus amongst Tucson’s Mexican- American community is that come Jan. 3, 2011, Raza Studies will be fully operational—continuing to educate and inspire minds and prepare students to attend colleges and universities nationwide. The program is virtually an anti-dropout program (more than a 90 percent graduation rate) and a college student factory (upwards of 70 percent go on to college).
State schools superintendent Tom Horne is a vocal proponent of the law, which renders him the target of a potentially historic lawsuit that some say could rival Brown v. Board of Education. The new law is just the latest in a slew of measures intended to make Arizona a hostile environment for Latinos, thereby discouraging immigration while driving attrition.
Know your rights
In response to growing hostility towards immigrant students of all ages, some schools have started educating youth about their rights—even distributing “Know Your Rights” cards.
As Elise Foley at the Washington Independent reports, a couple of San Diego schools have incurred a fair amount of controversy for doing just that. After receiving reports that undocumented students were having a hard time concentrating in school due to stress related to their immigration status, schools began disseminating pamphlets teaching kids to “protect yourself from immigration raids!” The pamphlets drew ire from local police, who argued that the illustrations portrayed them in a negative light.
Drop the I-Word
In the meantime, Colorlines has launched a campaign to counter negative depictions of the undocumented. They’ve teamed up with a host of other progressive organizations remove the term “illegals” from media discourse. The I-word, according to the campaign, “creates an environment of hate by exploiting racial fear and economic anxiety, creating an easy scapegoat for complex issues, and OK-ing violence against those labeled with the word.”
The I-word is particularly pernicious when applied to undocumented children, whose constitutionally protected right to a public education seems ever in question. By dropping the racially charged term, media outlets can better foster meaningful dialogue about immigrants and immigration instead of producing anti-immigrant sound bites that only foster division and hate.
The DREAM is not dead
In the same spirit of community empowerment, several non-profit organizations have launched a $300,000 Spanish-language campaign to leverage support of the DREAM Act into votes against the Republican Party. According to Sarah Kate Kramer of Feet in Two Worlds, the ads are being aired in nine crucial cities across the country, and feature a montage of voices claiming to be “the undocumented students of the DREAM Act.” They urge the public to vote Democratic, saying:
…who opposed this bill? Who wants to quash our dreams? Republicans. The same people who opposed the extension of unemployment benefits. Republicans. Who try to deny immigrant rights in Arizona and other states. Republicans. Who always seem to stand with big corporations against working families.
As mid-term elections draw nearer, anti-immigrant forces will likely come down harder on undocumented students whom they falsely claim are stealing public education from citizens. Fortunately, with Democrats promising to revisit the DREAM Act post-election, Latinos have everything to gain by getting out the votes.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: Nuclear Plants will go up in Georgia
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
If you were to look out to the horizon of the clean energy field right now, you would see the hazy outlines of nuclear reactors. President Barack Obama announced this week that two new nuclear plants will go up in Georgia, built on the promise that the federal government will guarantee $8.3 billion in loans—nearly the entire estimated cost of the project.
“It is a slap in the face to environmentalists,” says Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive. “Though these will be the first nuclear reactors constructed in more than three decades, Obama still labeled them, somehow, as part of the “technologies of tomorrow.””
The president’s announcement wasn’t the only environmental downer this week. Expectations for the next international climate negotiations, to be held in Mexico at the end of 2010, are already low, and yesterday Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ top climate negotiator, said he would step down this summer and join the private sector. To top it all off, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now faces sixteen lawsuits that would block its ability to decrease carbon emissions, including one backed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
A nuclear error
Although the Georgia reactors would be the first new nuclear construction in the country in decades, they mark the beginning of what the Obama administration hopes will be a shift towards nuclear energy. In the 2011 budget, President Obama proposed an expansion of the loan guarantee program that funds projects like these from $18.5 billion to $54.5 billion.
These nuclear projects deserve close scrutiny. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman details the problems with the Georgia reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) already rejected the initial designs for the plant. That means the estimated cost could well exceed the projected $8.5 billion, which Wasserman says, was low at the start.
“Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each, in some cases to more than $12 billion today,” he explains.
Risky business
In the past, energy firms like The Southern Company, the Atlanta-based group that is building the plants, could only imagine securing funding for new nuclear projects. These projects have a high risk of failure, and private investors do not dream of touching them.
Inter Press Service’s Julio Godoy reviewed several European studies on the feasibility of financing nuclear plants. One study from Citibank concluded that “the risks faced by developers … are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially,” Godoy reports. These risks include uncontrollable construction costs, long delays, and the possibility of low power prices that would not support that plants’ operation.
That’s one reason that green advocates disapprove of nuclear energy: The money could be better spent elsewhere. “People tend to think that environmentalists have some sort of allergic reaction to nuclear because they’re scared of radioactive waste and unsecured nuclear materials,” writes Aaron Wiener at The Washington Independent. “But when it comes down to it…It’s simply a bad investment to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a nuclear sinkhole when proven technologies such as wind and solar would provide guaranteed benefits.”
Wind to fly on
While the administration lavishes attention on nuclear, other clean energy industries are trying to move forward. In Wisconsin, a Spanish company is opening up a plant to build wind turbine components, which will bring much-needed jobs to the Milwaukee area, as Kari Lydersen reports for Working In These Times.
There’s always the threat, however, that gains like this will be rolled back by competition from China. Clean energy jobs can still be sent overseas, Lydersen points out. She argues that the United State could be providing a boost to the solar and wind industry in order to keep jobs here.
“Manufacturing in the United States could be driven both with incentives to the actual producers – like the tax break to Ingeteam [the Spanish company building the Wisconsin plant] and support for renewable energy through renewable energy portfolio (RPS) standards and other incentives,” she writes.
China as competition
From a purely environmental perspective, China’s headway into green technology is not a problem. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum reminds us that the whole world can benefit from advances in clean energy, wherever they happen. Climate change is, after all, a global crisis. But Drum concedes that fear of Chinese competition does serve some purpose:
“I’ve lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism,” he says. “Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that’s really technically accurate. Just figure that it’s close enough, it’s language everyone understands, and it’ll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.