Over half of dollar store items test positive for poisons including food and children's toys
Over half of dollar store items are poisonous
DC lawyer gives up career to live in a Louisiana tent & help her people
Colette Pichon Battle returned to Louisiana to help the community members who had bought fish dinners cooked by her family members in order to pay the fees that helped her become an attorney … and stayed. Pichon Battle gave up her DC career to establish the non-profit Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, that helps with a variety of life and legal issues that confront people rebuilding their lives in the wake of Katrina and the burden of generations of endemic poverty and environmental justice challenges.
CounterPunch tells the story of Ms. Pichon Battle‘s background and education, which informed her career choices. NeighborWorks America and StoryCorps’ video about Colette’s service includes images by Lady.
I come from a strong line of south Louisiana women who love the land and the water and the birds and the sky and the trees. We understand our entire existence requires a balance on this earth. I’d like to make sure that legacy is there when I’m gone.
~ Colette Pichon Battle
Hat tip to Jacqui Patterson for sharing the CounterPunch story.
Bernie Sanders: Koch Bros want to end equality, dignity and hope in America. Don’t let them.
Bernie Sanders lays out exactly what the Koch Brothers want.
With money comes power, and these guys have plenty of money, so watch out America: the Koch Brothers wealth increased by $12B in 2014. They are after your food stamps and other nutrition programs. They want Obamacare dismantled … and same for the United States Post Office, Social Security and housing assistance programs. They want prison populations increased and public education, gone forever. They want to house our parents and grandparents in homes where they decide what food and care they will get.
The Koch Brothers, the Walton Family (that owns Walmart) and their colleagues in ALEC want America to experience the type of crushing poverty portrayed by Dickens in Victorian England.
Your first defense against these monsters: to vote in politicians who are community minded and responsive to the needs of the people they serve – by voting out politicians loyal to their interests. No excuses about why you shouldn’t vote! Giving up your vote is the same as giving 2 votes to people who want to make you suffer: when one of those people cast his/her vote – and you failed to balance out the election results with your own vote – you just gave their vote double power.
Secondly, boycott. The sad truth is that a lot of these people’s wealth comes from selling us toilet paper, cleaning products and items like these. So learn what products their companies make – and don’t buy them. Ever. Once they get their hands on it, your money will be used against you, in every possible way.
Obama at Georgetown on breaking the cycle of poverty. Real talk.
At the Georgetown University #PovertySummit President Obama made some very real comments, tying his own background to modern society’s challenges in the areas of education and social investment; access to jobs, internet, transportation; mentoring, youth, fatherhood, families and community:
I am a black man who grew up without a father, and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence I think that my daughters are better off … For me to have that conversation does not negate my conversation about the need for early childhood education, or the need for job training, or the need for investment in infrastructure or jobs in low-income communities…
But when I’m sitting there talking to these kids, and I’ve got a boy who says, you know what, how did you get over being mad at your dad, because I’ve got a father who beat my mom and now has left, and has left the state, and I’ve never seen him because he’s trying to avoid $83,000 in child support payments, and I want to love my dad, but I don’t know how to do that — I’m not going to have a conversation with him about macroeconomics. (Laughter and applause.)
I’m going to have a conversation with him about how I tried to understand what it is that my father had gone through, and how issues that were very specific to him created his difficulties in his relationships and his children so that I might be able to forgive him, and that I might then be able to come to terms with that.
And I don’t apologize for that conversation.
25 year study shows poverty as greatest determinant in children’s success
Two John Hopkins professors tracked the scholastic and employment developments of 790 students via annual interviews conducted over 25 years from the time the students were 1st graders in Baltimore’s public school system until age 28. Their findings are disturbing, although certainly not surprising. The Washington Post article tell us,
A mere 4 percent of the first-graders Alexander and Entwisle had classified as the “urban disadvantaged” had by the end of the study completed the college degree that’s become more valuable than ever in the modern economy. A related reality: Just 33 of 314 had left the low-income socioeconomic status of their parents for the middle class by age 28.
And the John Hopkins HUB frames the research results a bit grimly:
In a groundbreaking study, Johns Hopkins University researchers followed nearly 800 Baltimore schoolchildren for a quarter of a century, and discovered that their fates were substantially determined by the family they were born into.
“A family’s resources and the doors they open cast a long shadow over children’s life trajectories,” Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander says in a forthcoming book, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood. “This view is at odds with the popular ethos that we are makers of our own fortune.”
Poverty creates poor school performance. Time to stop it.
Bobby Kennedy made hunger and poverty relief a top priority with his Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, but 50 years later the United States has the 2nd highest rate of poverty among industrialized nations. And Dale Hansen of the Detroit News is asking, if poverty is the biggest problem education faces, why aren’t we more focused on relieving it? Dale supplies his own answer: Republicans are way too committed to their war on public education to allow positive change to get in their way.
Huh?
History says that public education has been one of the leading mechanisms for lifting families out of poverty, so what statement is being made by Republicans and their allies who are systematically destroying public education in New Jersey Chicago, Philly, Michigan and other states? In New Jersey, for example, even though school districts directly controlled by the State are failing miserably, Christie just took over the Camden school district and has announced plans to facilitate privatization there as he has done in the three other State takeover school districts. Dale says,
… The reality is that the our-education-system-is-broken argument is .. fundamentally flawed. Republicans use it as an excuse to push their alternate agenda to corporatize our children’s education. Corporatization has been shown to be no better than the system they are working so hard to replace … Republicans … claim our education system is broken, insisting that teachers unions and bad teachers are the crux of the problem. Unfortunately, this is all based on anecdotal evidence as the data shows no such correlation.