GOtV: 2016 Election Issues That Matter

GOtV: 2016 Election Issues That Matter

Election 2016 marks my 11th presidential election since I became a voter in 1972. My generation was the first to take advantage of the 26th Amendment, granting the right to vote at age 18. It was passed by Congress on March 23, 1971 and ratified on July 1, 1971.

Can anyone seriously imagine that process being repeated in 2016 in that time frame? Even those of us who lived in the days before divided government can hardly remember a time when this nation was capable of doing big things here at home.

We just reached an important voting milestone in this country. For the first time in U.S. history, voter registration in America has hit the 200 million mark in people registered to vote. That is an increase of 50 million new registrants since 2008; a 33% increase in voter registrations in a year where the campaign has been the ugliest in living memory.

Yet for the first time since 1965, we have no Voting Rights law that covers the country. In fact, 17 states have enacted voting restrictions involving voter ID or other requirements for the first time in a presidential election. And we know from a Government Accountability Office report in 2014 that voter ID laws can reduce voting by 2 to 3 percent, particularly among young people, blacks and newly registered voters.

How many of those 200 million plus voters will actually get to the polls is unknown right now, but early indications are there is a lot of interest in those states who allow for early voting. New York is not one of them, so we’ll have to wait for Election Day to see who comes out this year.

Every year the pundits like to say that the stakes have never been higher, but in 2016, the stakes really have never been higher. The results of the Presidential race and those for the Senate and the House will determine what kind of a country we live in for the next 4 years. Just some of what is at stake:

Money in Politics – This ought to be self-evident in 2016, if any issue is. In race after race, the money that has poured into the campaigns comes from too few hands, many of which have a political agenda that does not comport with that of the average citizen.

Wealthy individuals, corporations, unions and other entities can use any of a range of vehicles -- including super PACs and tax-exempt nonprofits -- to invest in independent expenditures, electioneering communications and communication costs to try to sway the outcome of an election. While such groups aren't supposed to coordinate with the candidates they're supporting, they can coordinate with each other, and often do so in choosing which races to target with their funds. Learn more about outside spending on your federal candidates at: https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php

Energy & Climate Change – These two issues are closely linked and in the case of energy, it is also closely linked to the outside money discussed above. How energy is produced and where it comes from affect jobs, the economy and the environment, especially as it relates to climate change, environmental quality, and health. We’ve seen that up close here in New York State as hydrofracking has been discussed. We’re also seeing it play out on the national stage at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota over the pipeline protest. When is comes to climate change, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and nearly every professional organization of scientists have said it is real, man-made and a problem. You can track the amount of money going to your candidates at http://dirtyenergymoney.org/

Gun Violence – From strictly a public health perspective, America is in crises from gun violence. Hardly a day goes by but what somewhere in America a toddler uses an unsecured gun to shoot him or herself, a parent, or another child. School shootings still happen with depressing regularity in our nation, and guns play a significant role in domestic violence incidents and death by suicide. Candidates usually want to talk about the 2^nd Amendment when it comes to guns, conveniently forgetting about that all-important controlling first clause about a well-regulated militia. There are roughly 300 million firearms in the United States and tens of thousands of shootings each year, rarely at the hand of a well-regulated militia. Once upon a time in America, we voted in our locals schools. That is not the case in2016; education officials are rightly worried about the threat of gun violence at polling places. (Hello Banana Republic.)

Jobs & Wages – This issue really boils down to income inequality. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the economy has undergone a dramatic shift. Most average Americans have yet to recover, and most probably never will, since the solid blue collar jobs the Middle Class relied on are largely gone. The average income for the 99 percent (where most of us reside) is lower now than it was back in 1998 after adjusting for inflation. For the 1 percent, Happy Days are indeed here again. Last year, the average income for the top 1 percent of households climbed 7.7 percent to $1.36 million. And if you are a single parent household (which are overwhelming female), you much more likely to be poor.

Education – Nothing touches the American family like education. We have 50 million K-12 students in this country and 90 percent of the costs for keeping them there is borne by state and local taxpayers. And when it comes to higher education, the costs there have millions of students swamped by college debt they often can not find a job that makes enough for them to pay back their college loans within their working lifetime. We are seeing education debt peonage soar in this country. Did you know that about 74% of all undergraduates enrolled during the 2011-12 academic year possessed at least one characteristic of a nontraditional student, denoted by part-time enrollment, working full-time, identifying as a single caregiver, not having a traditional high school diploma, or financial independence?

Health Care – The good news on health care is that about 9 in 10 Americans now have health insurance, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The bad news is that millions still don’t have it and the costs are going up. The U.S. remains the only first world nation that doesn’t treat health care like a right, an investment in itself, its people and its workforce. We spend far more on health care than any advanced country, and our people are not that much healthier. And we’ve seen scandal after scandal by the prescription drug industry. One recent glaring example is the cost of EpiPens by Mylan. Another is the escalating price of narcan, the drug used to save countless lives in the opioids drug crises - 78 Americans die from an opioid overdose every day. Now we learn that the trade group for the pharmaceutical industry, PhRMA, is gearing up to defend drug prices after the election, seeking an additional $100 million in annual dues from its members, to boost the lobbying group's budget by 50 percent, giving it more than $300 million to draw on. The money in politics is costing the end consumer.

Civil Rights - from Black Lives Matter to LBGTQ Rights, civil rights have been a hot button issue during this campaign. These issues turn on one question: What kind of a society do we want? Do we choose the politics of inclusion or the politics of exclusion and hate? And many of the civil rights questions we look at today will hang on the judicial appointments of tomorrow. Most especially on the Supreme Court of the United States which has been handicapped without a ninth justice now for months. Racism and misogyny have both been issues in Campaign 2016. Given the current political climate on civil rights and the gridlocked Congress, the outcome of the federal elections on November 8 will go along way toward determining how we move forward – or backward – as a nation.

So cast your vote in November 8, but only after you have thought long and hard about the issues, where your candidates stand on those issues, and what kind of nation you want to live in. Because it won’t just be you living with the consequence of those decisions. It will be your children and grandchildren – and mine – and everyone else’s.

The Upstander Election

The Upstander Election

Enough is Enough. In fact, it is way more than enough.

Nothing could illustrate the need for a radical change in our thinking and our culture than these last two weeks in Election 2016. What we have seen is Rape Culture on display. Or worse. We’ve seen it glorified, exalted, and what is worse – excused.

Women, who are overwhelmingly the victims in sexual abuse, and all the men who are not abusers, have worked for decades to make a difference in how we look at these crimes and worked to end victim blaming. It has been an uphill fight all the way. And we can see why, given the rhetoric from this election cycle.

On Thursday, October 13, the women of America heard from a champion who articulated perfectly just what we think and feel when we hear the language that has been used. First Lady Michelle Obama gave voice to all of us in her speech in New Hampshire. I urge you to read her words and watch the video. Her passion and her agonizingly terrible conviction is inspiring.

TRANSCRIPT: Michelle Obama's Speech On Donald Trump's Alleged Treatment Of Women

“The fact is that in this election, we have a candidate for President of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and the course of this campaign, has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning that I simply will not repeat anything here today. And last week, we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. And I can't believe that I'm saying that a candidate for President of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women.

“And I have to tell you that I can't stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn't have predicted. So while I'd love nothing more than to pretend like this isn't happening, and to come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous to me to just move on to the next thing like this was all just a bad dream.

“This is not something that we can ignore. It's not something we can just sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election season. Because this was not just a "lewd conversation." This wasn't just locker-room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior, and actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us were worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV.”

http://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497846667/transcript-michelle-obamas-speech-on-donald-trumps-alleged-treatment-of-women

And strangely enough, there was another voice raised that day also made the point that “Enough is Enough.” It was made with hideous sarcasm and great distain, but the point was made.

Rush Limbaugh said:

“You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is?” Limbaugh asked no on in particular on his talk radio show Wednesday. “One thing. “You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element,” he continued. “Do you know what it is? Consent.”

https://www.salon.com/2016/10/14/conservative-blowhard-rush-limbaugh-dismissed-the-importance-of-consent-in-the-wake-of-trump-sexual-assault-claims_partner/

BINGO, Rush! You get it. And really, who expected that? Granted, that was not the point he was trying to make, but that doesn’t change the fact that he stated a truth we have been working toward for years: Consent is the key!

Mrs. Obama made the point that we have the tool we need to send an unmistakable message that Enough is Enough and that sexual assault is not okay, regardless of the power and celebrity of the perpetrator. As the immediate response to the tapes show:

Sexual assault and the Trump tape: 1 million women say it's #notokay

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/08/technology/notokay-twitter-donald-trump/index.html

That tool the First Lady said, is the vote. Consider:

Women Outnumber Men in All But Nine States

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 161 million females in the U.S. in 2013 versus 156.1 million males, or about a ratio of 1-to-1. That ratio shifts dramatically when looking at older populations, however: at age 85 and older, women outnumber men by a ratio of 2-to-1 (4.0 million to 2.0 million).

Nationally, females make up 50.8 percent of the population, but that percentage varies across states.

There are only nine states where males make up more than 50 percent of the population: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.

http://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/content/women-outnumber-men-all-nine-states

Consider also the immediate social media response “After FiveThirtyEight published maps showing the electoral college results if only men came out to vote, and if only women came out to vote, a new hashtag started to trend on Twitter: #repealthe19th. That's the 19th Amendment, the amendment that granted women the right to vote. Trump supporters — the majority of whom are men —figured that might be as good an option as any to ensure victory for their candidate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/13/donald-trumps-facing-an-apocalyptic-election-scenario-thanks-to-women-voters/

These maps are, by the way, imaginary. The response was anything but: #repealthe19th.

Lucky for us, social media is a double edged sword, of course, so there was a response to that hashtag. #Rejoicethe19th celebrates that women fought hard for the right to vote via the 19th amendment and Civil Rights Act.

What will the last few day of the campaign bring? The trends are pretty clear:

In every election since 1984, women have comprised more of the electorate than men. While women overall have backed the Democrat since 1988, white women have been an increasingly important part of Republican presidential strength in recent years.

This year, the white vote is much more split than it has been in the past, with white women — particularly college-educated white women — moving toward Hillary Clinton even more dramatically than white men without degrees have moved to Trump.

Trump's problems with women aren't isolated to his own party. Even before the hot-mic tape came out, his numbers were slipping among independents. Independent women have consistently been more supportive of Clinton than Trump, a scenario that seems likely to get even worse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/07/donald-trumps-woman-problem-just-got-much-much-much-worse/

My 8-year old granddaughter in 3^rd grade has been learning about Upstander behavior.

An upstander is someone who says “no” to bullying. In virtually all bully-victim situations, there are witnesses who view or know about the act. We want to make sure our kids are part of a community where everyone—kids and grownups alike—makes the decision to be an upstander, rather than a passive bystander who does nothing.

http://www.bullybust.org/parents/upstander-behavior

Election 2016 is crying out for Upstander Voters. I am one. Are you?

Happy 100th Birthday, Planned Parenthood, and Thank You!

Happy 100^th Birthday, Planned Parenthood, and Thank You!

While you would think it would be hard to argue with health care, it seems that Planned Parenthood has always been at the eye of a hurricane, right from the earliest days when founder Margaret Sanger challenged the status quo by providing contraception and other health services to women and men and educating the public about birth control and women’s health.

It is no exaggeration to say that women's progress in recent decades — in education, in the workplace, in political and economic power — can be directly linked to Sanger's crusade and women's ability to control their own fertility.

Let’s start by looking at the world that Margaret Sanger faced in the early years of the 20^th century. What was the reality for women – especially poor women - in terms of their reproductive lives? There was widespread ignorance of reproductive health, even among the medical professionals of the day. For too many women, they faced early and multiple pregnancies, which often resulted in early death.

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879 – 1966) saw this in her own family. Her mother, Anne Higgins, went through 18 pregnancies in 22 years, dying at the age of 49. Margaret was the sixth of eleven surviving children, and spent much of her youth assisting with household chores and caring for her younger siblings.

Supported by her two older sisters, Margaret Higgins attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, before enrolling in 1900 at White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer. She married and had three children.

Starting in 1911, Margaret Sanger worked as a visiting nurse in the slums of the East Side of New York City. During this work, she cared for too many women who underwent frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions from a lack of information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The women of the day could not access contraceptive information; it has been prohibited on grounds of obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock law and other state laws.

Recognizing the need for better education, Sanger wrote two columns on sex education entitled "What Every Mother Should Know" (1911–12) and "What Every Girl Should Know" (1912–13) for the socialist magazine New York Call. Her next step in 1914 was to create an eight-page monthly newsletter which promoted contraception named The Woman Rebel. She helped to popularized the term "birth control" as a more candid alternative to euphemisms such as "family limitation."

In 1915, she traveled to Europe, where attitudes toward family planning and more laws allowing contraceptives were ahead of those in America. She learned about diaphragms for contraception and began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States laws.

On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, which led to her arrest for distributing information on contraception. Her subsequent trial and appeal generated controversy and publicity on the topic. Sanger believed that in order for women to have a more equal footing in society and to lead healthier lives, they needed to be able to determine when to bear children. The family planning organizations she inspired eventually evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger continued her work, realizing that changes to federal and state laws were needed. In 1929, Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in order to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on contraception. Following her legal victory in 1936 that challenged a provision of the Comstock laws, the American Medical Association to adopted contraception as a normal medical service and a key component of medical school curriculums in 1937.

But state laws continued to restrict women’s access to contraception. The Supreme Court settled the matter in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut. The Court ruled that the Constitution protected a right to privacy. The case involved a Connecticut "Comstock law" that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception." By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it violated the "right to marital privacy", establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices. This and other cases view the right to privacy as a right to "protect[ion] from governmental intrusion."

But the reproductive ignorance that Sanger had identified and fought in the early 1900’s still raged. In 1970, women themselves took self-education action. OurBodies, Ourselves, first produced in newsprint for women by women, shared knowledge about women sexuality and health in an accessible format that could serve as a model for women who want to learn about themselves, communicate their findings with doctors, and challenge the medical establishment to change and improve the care that women received. It was published in 1973 and really started a revolution in self-care and awareness.

Local Planned Parenthoods continue to be a key part of the health care system for women and men. The clinics provide high-quality, affordable family planning and reproductive health care for millions women and men. And after 100 years, Planned Parenthood is still under political attack, even in the face of the otherwise unmet needs they fill:

In 2015, the Guttmacher Institute reported that "In two-thirds of the 491 counties in which they are located, Planned Parenthood health centers serve at least half of all women obtaining contraceptive care from safety-net health centers." Further, Planned Parenthood is the sole safety-net provider of family planning services "[i]n one-fifth of counties in which [it] is located." Guttmacher also found that "the average Planned Parenthood health center serves significantly more contraceptive clients each year than do safety-net centers run by other types of providers," which means that the organization "serve[s] a greater share of safety-net contraceptive clients than any other type of provider"

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2015/09/08/quantifying-planned-parenthoods-critical-role-in-meeting-the-need-for-publicly-supported-contraceptive-care/

If you think there would be financial consequence to defunding and closing Planned Parenthood centers, the Congressional Budget Office has run the numbers:

Permanently defunding Planned Parenthood would end up increasing government spending by $130 million over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, projects that defunding Planned Parenthood would actually end up increasing government spending because it would result in more unplanned births as women lost access to services like contraception. Medicaid would have to pay for some of those births, and some of the children themselves would then end up qualifying for Medicaid and other government programs.

So when you hear politicians target Planned Parenthood with closure, ask them what they would replace these health services with. If they don’t have a good answer, that is your answer.

Candidates must tell us how New York State can improve women’s whole health and better support women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care. Because the truths of women’s lives are these:

·       Three-quarters of women now entering the workforce will become pregnant on the job,

·       About half of all women in the U.S. have an unplanned pregnancy at some point in their lives.

·       Publicly funded family planning services in New York saved $605.8 million in public funds in 2010.

·       Young people between the ages of 15 to 24 account for 50% of all new STD’s, although they represent just 25% of the sexually experienced population.

·       130,691 of New Yorkers are living with diagnosed HIV in 2013, 30% of them women.

·       The Zika virus crisis illustrates the need for women to have full autonomy over their reproductive health, as well as government’s need to invest in ensuring women’s health.

So, ask the candidates for office in the elections you will be deciding this November about their plans to improve women’s health. See if their health care priorities match yours before you enter the voting booth!

Stay in touch with all the important economic security issues this fall as we #PowHerTheVote. Learn more and sign up at http://www.powherny.org/powher-the-vote/.

Why We Need Better Jobs NOW!

Why We Need Better Jobs NOW!

The overall economic news has been pretty good of late. The unemployment rate has fallen to a relatively low 4.9 percent – on average, but pockets of much higher unemployment survive and, for some people, their job prospects are very limited. The economy has been fundamentally transformed since the recession and many Americans struggle to keep up. The kind of solid, blue collar jobs an earlier generation relied on are in many cases gone, and gone for good.

A recent Census report says that fewer families are falling out of the Middle Class and may in fact be slowly improving their economic position. There has been a drop in the poverty rates from 14.8 percent in 2014 to 13.5 percent in 2015. But a year of positive growth hardly makes up for the disastrous fall most folks took since the bottom dropped out in 2008.

Too many of the new jobs in the new economy have been in lower-paying industries, such as fast-food restaurants, and higher-paying sectors, such as information technology. Middle-income jobs in areas like manufacturing and administrative support have barely recovered. And while average hourly pay scales are slowly rising, the growth rate is below levels needed for healthy economic growth.

Overall, household incomes are still below those in pre-2008. The 2015 grow touted by the Census Bureau shows that incomes are still 1.6 percent below 2007 levels and 2.4 percent below the 1999 peak.

We have to remember that less awful – which became the new “normal” during the Great Recession - still means that plenty of Americans are still in tough straights and a long way from recovery from their losses in the last 8 years. These include millions of children and young people who have grown up during those eight years who are just starting their working careers – or trying to.

There are still too many children being raised in poverty. In the United States, the household income disparity between the poorest children and those in the middle is nearly 59 percent. Almost half of all young children in the U.S. live in low-income families with incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty income guidelines.

In 2016, that means less than $48,600 for a family of four. The figure is $24,300 for a family of four at 100 percent. You can see the full range of figures on this webpage: http://familiesusa.org/product/federal-poverty-guidelines

These are families where one or both parents are working, but in low-wage jobs with too few hours and irregular schedules. They want to work, but the jobs they are working are not letting them make ends meet.

There are least 1.3 million preschoolers and children in K-12 who are attending public schools this year who are homeless. The return to school means a hot meal and shelter, at least during the school day. Starting on Oct. 1, schools have to meet new requirements to better identify and support homeless students under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which was passed nearly 30 years ago and was reauthorized under the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Better jobs that promise a living wage and benefits for those families would mean a real home for these students and a real chance at a better life.

One of the often invisible effects of poverty for young children is what happens to their development - effects that can start before birth. Two recent studies have found that higher mandated hourly wages lead to healthier babies at birth. And the effects of poverty become more pronounced as these children develop:

Deep poverty puts young children at risk for poor health, development

Young children in deep poverty, whose family income is below 50 percent of the federal poverty line, fare even worse on health and development indicators than children in poverty, according to a study.

Compared to other children in poverty, a lower percentage of children in deep poverty were judged by parents to be "flourishing," a composite measure that reflects parents' view of the child's curiosity, resilience, affection, and positive mood. Less positive views of children's wellness were especially common among parents of children who experienced frequent parenting stress. Only 22 percent of deeply poor, frequently stressed parents of children younger than age 5 reported their children were flourishing compared to 48 percent with low parenting stress. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160112144414.htm

And while some of the poverty news is encouraging, for American’s newest adults, it is anything but. For young adults (ages 18-24), the 19 percent poverty rate was largely unchanged from 19.6 percent in 2014. These are the young folk that will, if they can get an education and job training, become the next workforce generation.

These are also the young people least likely to be able to afford post-secondary education, which is a critical component of success in later life. The new economy jobs with a decent paycheck require more education – and more specialized education - than in the past.

The high cost of college and crushing college debt load means we are failing to invest in the long-term employment success of too many of our young people. These are the workers we will need if we are to have a robust 21^st economy that works for all of us.

Obtaining a postsecondary education is the best guarantee for entering and staying in the middle class. The unemployment rate for college-educated adults—at 2.8 percent—is less than half the rate for those who never finished postsecondary education. Someone who has completed a bachelor’s degree earns double the median wages of a high school graduate; for individuals who have completed an associate degree, wages are 39 percent higher. For many, higher education is the key to a middle-class life.

https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/07090702/RWRW-HigherEd.pdf

And for the one in four households with children where Mom is the sole or primary breadwinner, the pay gap that exists across the board in every occupation is a special burden. Regardless of the latest research that suggests that the U.S. economy has improved, women and their families are still struggling to make income match outgo. Better jobs would make that balancing act easier.

The Gender Wage Gap Is Wider in States with a Low Minimum Wage

While no state has yet closed the gender wage gap, places like New York and Delaware are getting closer, with working women earning nearly 89 cents to men’s dollar. But in states like Wyoming and Louisiana, the gender wage gap was just 64.4 cents and 68 cents, respectively.

These stark state-by-state differences aren’t coincidences. In states where the minimum wage increased in 2015, workers with the lowest incomes—those whose wages were in the bottom 10 percent—experienced much faster wage growth than workers in states where no minimum-wage change took place. This wage growth was particularly strong for women, who make up two-thirds of low-wage workers. And in the 21 states where low-wage workers are stuck at $7.25 an hour for the seventh year in a row, the gender pay gap is nearly 25 percent wider than in higher minimum-wage states.

https://talkpoverty.org/2016/09/23/gender-wage-gap-wider-states-low-minimum-wage

Better jobs would/could:

·       Further reduce poverty rates

·       Establish a new normal that improves job quality and work conditions

·       Raise wages and ensure fair pay practices

·       Create care-centered work policies to address work-family needs

·       Restore and grow the Middle Class

·       Reduce the social costs to local and state governments from low-wage jobs with no benefits create

So, ask the candidates for office in the elections you will be deciding this November about their plans to improve work and create better jobs. See if their economic priorities match yours before you enter the voting booth!

Stay in touch with all the important economic security issues this fall as we #PowHerTheVote. Learn more and sign up at http://www.powherny.org/powher-the-vote/.