EFTA00633220.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bce: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 03/26/2017 Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2017 07:43:46 +0000 Attachments: CHUCK BERRY_GODDAMN_interview BY LUKE DITTRICH_Dec._18,2011.docx; These_86_Programs_Would_Lose_Federal_Fun—ding_Uitder_Trump_Bloomberg_March_16, 20 I 7.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(I).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(13).png; image(14).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png DEAR FRIEND A Real American Hero The Innocence Project turns 25 this year. lit Inline image 1 The criminal justice system is far from perfect. More often than you might think, innocent people are convicted of crimes they did not commit. Often these victims are poor, uneducated with little or no EFTA00633220 resources. When that occurs, the consequences for the lives of the wrongfully convicted and their families are truly devastating. Inline image 2 The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. To date, the work of the Innocence Project has led to the freeing of 343 wrongfully convicted people based on DNA, including 20 who spent time on death row, and the finding of 147 real perpetrators. Again, these are only the DNA-based exonerations. Numbers for all exonerations are considerably higher. The University of Michigan Law School's National Registry of Exonerations reported that as of two months ago the total number of known exonerations since 1989 were 1,784, of which no fewer than 156 were at one point on death row. Contributing Factors Mistaken Identification, False Confession, Bad Forensic, Evidence, Perjury / False Accusation and Official Misconduct. Inline image 3 The Innocence Project was established in the wake of a landmark study by the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate, in conjunction with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions. The original Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Scheck and Neufeld as part of the Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City. It became an independent 501(c) non-profit organization in 2003 but maintains strong institutional connections with Cardozo. The current Executive Director of the Innocence Project is Madeline deLone. EFTA00633221 Exonerations Total By Year Inline image 4 Here are a few of the numbers behind these exonerations: --Number of U.S. post-conviction DNA exonerations: 311 --Number of prisoners sentenced to death before DNA proved their innocence: 18 --Number of prisoners charged with capital crimes but not sentenced to death: 16 --Longest sentence served by a DNA exoneree: 35 years --Average length of sentence served by DNA exonerees: 13.6 years --Approximate total years served by all DNA exonerees: 4,156 --Average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions: 27 --Percentage of prisoners exonerated by DNA testing who are people of color: 70% --Percentage of DNA exoneration cases where the actual perpetrator has been identified by DNA testing: Almost so% --Number of U.S. states (and Washington, D.C.) where exonerations have been won: 36 --Number of DNA exonerees who pleaded guilty to crimes they didn't commit: 29 --Number of DNA exonerations that involved the Innocence Project: 171 --Year of the first Innocence Project DNA exoneration: 1989 Note: Other exonerations were helped by Innocence Network organizations, private attorneys and by pro se defendants, according to the Innocence Project. A 1996 study by written C. Ronald Huff, director of the Criminal Justice Research Center and the School of Public Policy and Management at Ohio State University — Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful EFTA00633222 Conviction and Public Policy. Huff concluded that more than 10,000 innocent people are convicted each year or 0.05% of all convictions. And the study was based on crimes in the year 1990 that were reported by the FBI, which included murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson. "Wrongful convictions undermine public confidence in the judicial system and should be viewed with alarm," said Huff. It troubles Huff that liberals seem more concerned about the issue than conservatives. "Conservatives, too, should be concerned because it's a public safety issue. The actual offender remains free to victimize other citizens." Huff cites the case of William Jackson, a Columbus man who spent five years behind bars in the early 1980s for rapes later determined to have been committed by a physician who was similar in appearance and had the same last name. "No one has ever known for sure how many women Dr. Jackson raped while the wrong man was in prison. He had five more years to continue his serial rapes." What causes wrongful convictions? To find out, Huff and his co-authors created a database of 205 wrongful convictions collected from a variety of sources. After analyzing these cases, the researchers found that most wrongful convictions resulted from a combination of errors. The main cause in more than half of the cases -- 52.3 percent -- was eyewitness misidentification. That's understandable, Huff said. 'The victims are not, at the time of the crime, concentrating too much on the features of the assailant's face. For example, they may be looking at the weapon. The trauma of the moment interferes with their ability to recall details." The next most common main cause was perjury by a witness, which contributed to 11 percent of the convictions. Other problems included negligence by criminal justice officials, coerced confessions, 'frame ups" by guilty parties, and general overzealousness by officers and prosecutors. Overzealousness can lead authorities to make careless, if unintentional errors, and cause some authorities to bend rules to get a known criminal off the street. Failure to keep an open mind can cause errors that become rubber-stamped by trusting colleagues as the case moves through the judicial process, Huff says. By the time the errors are discovered, the trail to the real offender is cold. Public pressure to solve a case and the organizational culture of a police or district attorney's office can affect the process. While most errors are unintentional, the researchers say there are far too many incidences of unethical and unprofessional behavior. "Our research has convinced us that such unethical conduct in the United States has not, in general, received appropriate attention, nor has it been adequately punished," Huff said. From their beginnings, innocence projects have played an enormously valuable role in the criminal justice system. With legal aid funding being hit by austerity cuts and current economic and socio- political policies; convicted felons seeking financial assistance to claim wrongful convictions are hardly expected to fare better than the tens of thousands of merely accused who struggle for legal help. For those people challenging their convictions and appeals without representation, their chances are slim to none. This is why innocence projects are crucial. Another value to the pro bono nature of EFTA00633223 innocence projects, being as they are affiliated with higher education institutions, public interest law firms or charities, is they are independent and immune from the political pressures of being housed in government ministries. Again as Professor Huff pointed out "Wrongful convictions undermine public confidence in the judicial system and should be viewed with alarm." With this, I would like to give a shout out to The Innocence Projectfor its 25 years ofpublic service of righting wrongs and saving lives.... ****** So True "It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished.... when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever." Sir William Blackstone ****** Inline image 1 Last week President Trump unveiled his budget plan that calls for a sharp increase in military spending and stark cuts across much of the rest of the government including the elimination of dozens EFTA00633224 of long-standing federal programs that assist the poor, fund scientific research and aid America's allies abroad. Trump's first budget proposal, which he named "America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again," would increase defense spending by $54 billion and then offset that by stripping money from more than 18 other agencies. Some would be hit particularly hard, with reductions of more than 20 percent at the Agriculture, Labor and State departments and of more than 3o percent at the Environmental Protection Agency. It would also propose eliminating future federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Within EPA alone, 5o programs and 3,200 positions would be eliminated. The cuts could represent the widest swath of reductions in federal programs since the drawdown after World War II, probably leading to a sizable cutback in the federal non-military workforce, something White House officials said was one of their goals. "You can't drain the swamp and leave all the people in it," White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters. Winners And Losers (Sad!) In Trump's Budget WINNERS Defense contractors. The clearest winner in Trump's budget are defense contractors and the military, which would receive an additional $54 billion to pay for ... pretty much anything. Among several other funding targets, the budget document cites "stocks of critical munitions," "rebuilding readiness," a "more lethal jointforce" and "additional F-35 Joint Strike Fighters" (the last have proved to be a multitrillion-dollar disaster). "This increase alone exceeds the entire defense budget of most countries, and would be one of the largest one-year [Defense Department] increases in American history," the budget document reads. People who want to chase down and deport immigrants. The budget proposes $314 million to hire 500 new border patrol age nts and 1,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The Wall. Trump wants to give the Department of Homeland Security an additional $2.6 billion, some of which would be used to "plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border." The actual wall, of course, would cost much more than $2.6 billion, but Rome wasn't built in a day. EFTA00633225  Inline image 3 If you're a poor person in America, President Trump's budget proposal is not for you. VJ Inline image 2 President Trump's budget would slash or abolish programs that have provided low-income Americans with help on virtually all fronts, including affordable housing, banking, weatherizing homes, job EFTA00633226 training, paying home heating oil bills, and obtaining legal counsel in civil matters. During the presidential campaign last year, Trump vowed that the solution to poverty was giving poor people incentives to work. But most of the proposed cuts in his budget target programs designed to help the working poor, as well as those who are jobless, cope. And many of them carry out their missions by disbursing money to the states, which establish their own criteria. "This is a budget that pulled the rug out from working families and hurts the very people who President Trump promised to stand up for in rural America and in small towns," said Melissa Boteach, vice president of the poverty to prosperity program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. The White House budget cuts will fall hardest on the rural and small town communities that Trump won, where one in three people are living paycheck to paycheck — a rate that is 24 percent higher than in urban counties, according to a new analysis by the center. The budget proposes housing "reforms" that add up to more than $6 billion in cuts while promising to continue assisting the nation's 4.5 million low-income households. If enacted, the proposed budget would result in the most severe cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development since the early 1980s, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It would also eliminate the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness across 19 federal agencies and on June 22, 2010, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and its 19 federal agency members started Opening Doors, the first-ever comprehensive federal plan to prevent and end homelessness. Amended in 2012 and 2015, the plan sets four ambitious goals in order to drive action and progress: • • Prevent and end homelessness among Veterans in 2015 • • Finish the job of ending chronic homelessness in 2017 • • Prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children in 2020 • • Set a path to ending all types of homelessness Through the urgent action mobilized by Opening Doors, we've seen significant reductions in homelessness across all our goals since 2010: • • 11% reduction nationwide • • 22% reduction in chronic homelessness • • 19% reduction in family homelessness, including a 64% drop in unsheltered homelessness among families • • 47% reduction in Veteran homelessness, including a 56% drop in unsheltered homelessness among Veterans Consider This: More than 30 communities, including the entire states of Virginia, Connecticut, and Delaware, have also effectively ended homelessness among Veterans. Using these as examples, it is obvious that if we as a country really decided too, we could end homelessness and eliminate poverty. As such, it is reasonable to believe that hunger, homelessness and poverty are choices that the richest country in the world could eradicated if it chose to make it our #1 priority. EFTA00633227 The administration's reforms include eliminating funding for a $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, one of the longest continuously run HUD programs that's been in existence since 1974 and was enacted by Republican President Gerald Ford with bipartisan support. The program provides cities with money to address a range of community development needs such as affordable housing, rehabilitating homes in neighborhoods hardest hit by foreclosures, and preventing or eliminating slums and community blight. Nationally, CDBG funds were spent for the following purposes in 2011: • • Public infrastructure (32.7%) • • Housing (24.8%) • • Administrative and planning (15.1%) • • Public services (11.4%) • • Economic development (7.3%) • • Property acquisition (4.9%) • • Other (3.8%) It also provides funding for Meals on Wheels, a national nonprofit network of more than 5,000 independently-run local programs that delivers food to more than a million homebound seniors across the country. Although Meals on Wheels America, is mainly funded by donations, its local affiliates get more federal funding from a separate Department of Health and Human Services program. In the Trump budget the agency's overall allocation would be cut by 17.9 percent. Another program to be axed are the 21st Century Community Learning Centers — helps school districts, churches and nonprofit groups serve more than 1.6 million children nationwide. As well as Wings for Kids, a program that aims to bolster not only academic performance, but also social skills, relationships with caring adults and a sense of belonging at school and provide kids with a safe and enriching place to spend the afternoon and early evening, and their working parents get child care. But now, Wings for Kids and thousands of programs like it are on the chopping block, threatened by President Trump's proposal to eliminate $1.2 billion in grants for after-school and summer programs. Trump's budget will also eliminate billions for teacher training and scale back or end several programs that help low-income students prepare and pay for college. Also gone would be $35 million in funding for well-known programs such as Habitat for Humanity and YouthBuild USA, fair housing planning, and homeless assistance, among other housing help for needy Americans. Other targets include funding for neighborhood development and a home-buying program through which low-income individuals help build their own homes. Trump also plans to cut the Home Investment Partnership Program, the largest federal grant to state and local governments that is designed to create affordable housing. In a statement, Habitat for Humanity International said it has used $92 million worth of Section 4 funds since 1998 that it paired with $162 million in private donations. "Federal funding received by Habitat for Humanity supplements and leverages the support of our generous donors," the organization said. "It never replaces or duplicates it." EFTA00633228 This is money that goes to Habitat for Humanity and other charities that build and refurbish houses for poor people. But don't worry — according to the budget, nice rich people are already giving poor people all the housing help they need. "This program is duplicative of efforts funded by philanthropy and other more flexible private sector investments," the document declares. Also screwed by President Trump's budget are Workers. The Trump spending plan slashes funds for a variety of Labor Department programs pertaining to worker training and safety. While the details of President Donald Trump's proposed 2018 budget remain scant, one thing is clear: The Department of Labor will likely be one of the biggest losers. Trump's budget proposal would cut the department's funding by $2.5 billion, or 21 percent, which will mean drastic changes for the work the department does. The dramatic scale-back is meant to offset the proposed budget's additional funding to national- security efforts. The proposal says, "With the need to rebuild the Nation's military without increasing the deficit, this Budget focuses the Department of Labor on its highest priority functions and disinvests in activities that are duplicative, unnecessary, unproven, or ineffective." Those are strong adjectives for programs that have helped put Americans back to work, a consistent and bipartisan economic goal. The 2018 budget details around $5oo million in cuts for the department, which likely means that programs for disadvantaged workers, including seniors, youths, and those with disabilities, would be reduced or completely eliminated. The Senior Community Service Employment Program, training grants at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and technical-assistance grants at the Office of Disability Employment Policy would all disappear. Job-training centers for disadvantaged children would be shuttered and funding for more general job-training and employment services would move from the federal budget to states. While Obama's budget did make some cuts similar to the ones proposed by Trump for the Labor Department, these reductions signal a definitive break from Obama's strategy, which focused on the inclusion of workers who might otherwise be left out of the workforce without government intervention. The National Employment Law Project (NELP), a left-leaning nonprofit, has spoken out against the cuts, calling Trump's budget for the Labor Department "draconian." "The Trump budget would gut the very job-training programs workers need to develop the skills required to compete in emerging fields and fill many of the high-paying jobs available now and projected for the future," said Christine Owens, the executive director of the NELP, in a statement. For instance, the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) — a federal initiative that has provided employment training to low-income Americans over 55 years old for more than 4o years — now faces an uncertain future. In 2015, Obama slashed the SCSEP's funding in his budget and has proposed moving the program from the Labor Department to the Department of Health and Human Services, where other programs for senior Americans are housed. Jim Seith, a EFTA00633229 director at the nonprofit National Council on Aging, one of the grantees of the SCSEP, says that the program is the only labor programs targeted at seniors in poverty. Another program that's likely facing cuts is Job Corps, which provides free education and job training for disadvantaged minors. This program also faced cuts in past Obama budgets. An economic cost-benefit study of the Job Corps program from 2008 found that it was the "only federal training program that has been shown to increase earnings for this population," leading participants to go further in school, reducing their criminal activity, and increasing their average earnings for several years after the program, although the earnings gains were only sustained by older participants. The budget includes closing centers where some 37,000 unemployed and underemployed youths receive job training. "Basing important decisions on Job Corps performance measures could be more complicated than it appears," said Peter Schochet, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research who led the study on the Job Corps program, via email. "Our data show that some Job Corps centers improved student earnings relative to what they would have been, even among centers with lower overall performance measures." In addition to these cuts, the budget beefs up some Labor Department initiatives that are aimed at getting people back to work. The proposal would expand the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment program, which is designed to make people less likely to claim unemployment insurance by referring recipients to programs and services that would help them find jobs. The program was found to be successful in Nevada, with participants in the program receiving unemployment funds for fewer weeks. Another expansionary effort in the proposed budget calls for apprenticeship programs, to be administered by states. Science. It's hard to overstate just how devastating this budget would be to the science and biomedical research community. The Environment. President Trump's budget blueprint would slash the Environmental Protection Agency by 31.5 percent, making the E.P.A. the hardest hit agency under the President's proposal — $2.6 billion from its current level of $8.2 billion. As a result, it would totally eliminate the Chesapeake Bay Program, a hugely successful federally funded six-state partnership over the past 15 years that enjoys bipartisan support. The $73 million-a-year Environmental Protection Agency program has united Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and the District of Columbia and substantially reduced pollution levels in the bay. Cutting off funding, bipartisan supporters of the cleanup say, would threaten multibillion dollar tourism, recreation and commercial industries and could reverse strides in water quality that sustain fishing, boating and crabbing in the largest estuary in North America. Almost unnoticed is the Trump spending reductions that explicitly target rural communities include a water and wastewater loan and grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program, with an annual budget of $498 million, helps rural communities fix water infrastructure systems. Trump's budget proposes to eliminate the entire program, arguing that private financing and increased funding from Environmental Protection Agency state revolving water funds can offset the "duplicative" USDA program. EFTA00633230 But rural advocates say there's a problem with that plan. The $2.3 billion budget for the EPA's state revolving funds program is slated to increase $4 million — less than 1 percent. And many rural water systems are not equipped to compete with larger systems for that money. These smaller water systems also are less appealing to private investors, due to their limited, lower-income customer bases. This federal initiative has been the historical solution for small and rural water infrastructure needs and is largely responsible for the success of delivering water and sanitation to almost every corner of rural America. Elimination of the USDA rural water program will disproportionately impact the most economically disadvantaged and especially rural communities, in addition to hurting the country. Many of these communities are already struggling to comply with federal standards to deliver reliably safe drinking water. About 4 million rural Americans receive water from small, under-resourced water utilities that don't properly conduct required lead testing, USA Today reported last year. The bulk of these water utilities are also dealing with decaying delivery systems. Small water systems will need an estimated $64.5 billion in infrastructure spending over the next 20 years, according to an EPA assessment. In addition to massively reducing the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, outright eliminating the NASA satellite program, implementing a $9oo million cut to the Department of Energy's Office of Science, ending the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and slashing $250 million in grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it would also slash funds for the National Institutes of Health by $6 billion. That would put the NIH funding level at a 15-year low and would more than erase the funding that Congress had pledged to devote to the institutes when it passed the 21st Century Cures Act at the tail end of the last Congress. Benjamin Corb, director of public affairs at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, called the budget "unacceptable." It would erase "years' worth of bipartisan support for the NIH, and the American biomedical research enterprise which has long been the global leader for biomedical innovation," he warned. Big Bird. The budget would eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS, which airs "Sesame Street." People who want to be nurses. Say goodbye to $403 million in training for health professionals and nursing programs. Artists. The National Endowment for the Arts would be no more, as would the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has funded all sorts of cool stuff but as important as well, including Ken Burns' Civil War documentary. EFTA00633231 TBD. Social Security and Medicare — two of the biggest parts of federal spending — are omitted from the document, as is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an influential liberal think tank, noted that while past administrations have created simplified spending blueprints, Trump's decision to not even include details on such "mandatory" spending programs is unusual. "In contrast, while all five previous administrations released initial budgets that displayed information in very different ways, they all provided a more complete picture of how their policies affected total spending, revenues, and deficits (or surpluses), and showed them for several years beyond the budget year," Richard Kogan said in a blog post on the think tank's website. Trump budget director: Feeding elderly and children has to end, it's not 'showing any results Inline image 1 White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told the White House press corps last week that popular vote loser Donald Trump's budget cuts Meals on Wheels and after- school nutrition programs because those programs "aren't showing any results." "We can't do that anymore. We can't spend money on programs just because they sound good. Meals on Wheels sounds great. [...] I can't defend that anymore. We cannot defend that anymore. $20 trillion in debt. We're going to spend money, we're going to spend a lot of money but we're not going to spend it on programs that show they deliver the promises we made to people." As for the school children: 'They're supposed to help kids who don't get fed at home get fed so they do better in school. Guess what? There's no evidence they're actually doing that. There's no evidence they're helping results, helping kids do better in school, which is what -- when we took your money from you to EFTA00633232  say, we're going to spend them on after-school program, we justified it by saying these kids will do better in school and get jobs. We have no proof that's helping." Goddammit old people and school children! Get out there and get jobs so we know that feeding you is worth our money. No, Mulvaney says, the "compassionate" thing to do is for tax payers, to "go to them and say, look, we're not going to ask you for your hard-earned money anymore. Single mom of two in Detroit, give us your money. We're not going to do that anymore unless they can guarantee that money will be used in a proper function." That, he says, "is about as compassionate as you can get." Because, really, wouldn't we all rather fund a few more destroyers than see our neighbors not starve? On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised not to cut Social Security or Medicare. "I can confirm to you that the president's going to keep the promises he made with regard to those programs," Mulvaney told reporters. Trump also repeatedly promised not to cut Medicaid. The health care bill he is currently pushing would slash the program by $88o billion, taking away health insurance for millions of Americans, which in turn would be mostly redistributed as tax breaks to the rich. As Matthew Yglesias wrote last week in VOX — President Donald Trump's debut budget proposal is a stark declaration of war on the future of the American economy that substitutes a curious mix of ideology and blind nostalgia for any effort to think critically about the actual needs of a 21st-century nation. The war starts with reducing spending — even though an aging population, plus the government's role in inherently labor-intensive activities like education and long-term care, militates overwhelmingly in favor of a somewhat larger role for the state. But it continues with the priorities Trump set for where the remaining cash gets spent. The picture that emerges is overwhelmingly one of nostalgia — more money for men with guns, less money for education, caring, and pointy-headed science. But nostalgia is not memory. The mid- century economy Trump yearns for was, almost by definition, less technologically advanced and educationally intensive than today's. But it was an extraordinarily forward-looking time. Propelled by the imperatives of Cold War competition, the United States made investments on an unprecedented scale in institutions dedicated to education and research, while engaging in massive public-private partnerships to disseminate then-new technological marvels like cars, phones, and televisions. Trump's budget doesn't imitate the past; it simply looks backward to it in a way that postwar Americans never would. The government's manly men — the ones with guns, mostly — get more cash. Programs aimed at effeminate or pointy-headed undertakings like educating children get cut. Not just in obvious places like the Department of Education, either. Little educational programs in departments from State to NASA are getting zapped. Job training is in line for cuts, along with K-12 schooling and college education for the disadvantaged. Scientific research — whether at Energy, NOAA, the NIH, or anywhere else — is out. Trump's America will give up on the dream of becoming a world leader in generating dean electricity or manufacturing the advanced batteries that store it. His statements on automobile fuel efficiency regulations make it dear that we won't be operating on the cutting edge there, either. Once the Environmental Protection Agency is gutted by cuts of over 25 percent, after all, well all be able to get good-paying jobs in coal mines and won't miss the skill- and technology-driven future Trump is destroying. EFTA00633233  A fiscal manifestation of nostalgia politics A presidential budget submission can play many roles — highlighting the alleged unreasonableness of congressional opposition, putting a new idea on the public agenda, rewarding a key interest group, or picking a symbolically useful fight— but for a newly elected president blessed with congressional majorities, one would expect it to also be a fairly literal legislative proposal. Trump's budget is different. Its military spending increases would violate the Budget Control Act of 2011, meaning that it could not actually be passed as a budget. (The law itself could be amended, but that, unlike a budget, would take 6o votes). Which is just as well, because a budget that completely ignores both taxes and the domestic entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, plus some smaller items — isn't really a budget at all. Instead, it's simply an effort to translate a policy-ignorant candidate's often nonsensical campaign rhetoric into something budget-shaped. Trump promised to balance the budget while cutting taxes and preserving entitlements — which isn't possible. So huge swathes of the budget are simply missing. He promised a big defense hike, so it's in there even though it's illegal. As a blueprint for actually doing anything, it's a mess. But that's not the point. Writing laws is House Speaker Paul Ryan's job. Trump's budget is campaign rhetoric made manifest. That campaign rhetoric was unprecedentedly backward-looking and nostalgic. Trump ran, literally, on making America better by malting it more closely resemble the America of the past. While Democrats debated ways to make college tuition more affordable, Trump appealed to older white working-class voters with the notion that there is no need for anything to change over time — no need for immigrants to sustain the country's demographics, no need for more education and more soft people skills to maintain relevance to the changing needs of the workplace. And so the nostalgia candidate has delivered a nostalgia budget. America needs to get real A little dose of Trump's old-school approach was a necessary and useful corrective to an elite discourse that, four or five years ago, seemed too often to take it for granted that any day now literally everyone would be learning to code from MOOCs while riding in a self-driving car between various exciting "gig economy" employment opportunities at hip downtown lofts. This is a big, diverse country, encompassing not just urban centers and peripatetic young people, but small towns and 5o-somethings with chronic knee trouble. It needs to offer people more than an endless series of overhyped apps. But Trump's rhetoric, and now his spending blueprint, don't just push back against techno-utopianism. They constitute a denial of the obvious truth that a prosperous society is necessarily going to be one that is evolving and changing over time. EFTA00633234 Most Americans work in the service sector, and that was true 20 or 4o years ago, too. And even within the goods-producing sector, today's highly paid jobs require more skills and training than their 1976 counterparts did. The country as whole, meanwhile, needs to continually develop whole new industries (generation, storage, and transmission of clean energy seems like the obvious candidate to me) to create new opportunities for new generations of people just as it did in the past. One of the main things that was good about the "good old days" is that they were a time of massive progress, expansion of higher education opportunities into the middle class and rapid development of new products and cures. This happened while the government invested more — not less — on health, education, science, and regional development. *** As renowned American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson pronounced last week, "Trump's budget will make America weak, sick & stupid" and "We all want to Make America Great Again. But that won't happen until we first make America smart again." As such the one thing that we know now is that from both Paul Ryan's healthcare reform proposal and President's budget if either are enacted, middle-class and poor Americans are royally screwed. ****** Bombs vs Food The Trump Administration Chooses to Bomb this Child and Other then Feed Them Inline image 1 When I saw this grotesque picture in the New York Times of young Udal Faisal who was hospitalized in Sana, Yemen with malnutrition and died days later I was repulsed. It was in Nicholas ICristofs March EFTA00633235 i8, 2017 article - `That Food Saved My Life,' and Trump Wants to Cut It Off The article focuses on the most important humanitarian crisis in the world today — the looming famine that threatens 20 million people in four countries. "We arefacing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations," warned Stephen O'Brien, the U.N.'s humanitarian chief. "Without collective and coordinated global efforts, people will simply starve to death." Yet, the way President Trump is responding to this crisis is by slashing humanitarian aid, increasing the risk that people starve in the four countries — Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria. The result is a perfect storm: Millions of children tumbling toward famine just as America abdicates leadership and cuts assistance. "This is the worst possible time to make cuts," David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, told me. He said that "the great danger" is a domino effect — that the U.S. action encourages other countries to back away as well. The essence of the Trump budget released last week is to cut aid to the needy, whether at home or abroad, and use the savings to build up the military and construct a wall on the border with Mexico. (Yes, that's the wall that Trump used to say Mexico would pay for. Instead, it seems it may actually be paid for by cutting meals for America's elderly and by reducing aid to starving Yemeni children.) It's important to note that "all of these crises are fundamentally manmade, driven by conflict," as Neal ICenyGuyer, C.E.O. of Mercy Corps, put it. And the U.S. bears some responsibility. In particular, the catastrophe in Yemen — the country with the greatest number of people at risk of famine — should be an international scandal. A Saudi led coalition, backed by the United States, has imposed a blockade on Yemen that has left two-thirds of the population in need of assistance. In Yemen, "to starve" is transitive. The suffering there gets little attention, partly because Saudi Arabia mostly keeps reporters from getting to areas subject to its blockade. Kristof wrote that he has been trying to enter since the fall, but the Saudi coalition controls the air and sea and refuses to allow him in. In effect, the Saudis have managed to block coverage of the crimes against humanity they are perpetrating in Yemen, and the U.S. backs the Saudis. Echoing Kristof -- Shame on us. Likewise, the government in South Sudan this month denied me a visa; it doesn't want witnesses to its famine. In the United States, humanitarian aid has been a bipartisan tradition, and the champion among recent presidents was George W. Bush, who started programs to fight AIDS and malaria that saved millions of lives. Bush and other presidents recognized that the reasons to help involve not only our values, but also our interests. Think what the greatest security threat was that America faced in the last decade. One could argue that it might have been Ebola, or some other pandemic — and we overcame Ebola not with aircraft carriers but with humanitarian assistance and medical research — both of which are slashed in the Trump budget. Whereas, President Trump's vision of a security threat is a Chinese submarine or perhaps an unauthorized immigrant, and that's the vision his budget reflects. But in 2017 some of the gravest threats we face are from diseases or narcotics that can't be flattened by a tank but that can be addressed with diplomacy, scientific research, and social programs inside and outside our borders. EFTA00633236 It's true that American foreign aid could be delivered more sensibly. It's ridiculous that one of the largest recipients is a prosperous country, Israel. Trump's budget stipulates that other aid should be cut, but not Israel's. The U.S. contributes less than onefifth of 1 percent of our national income to foreign aid, about half the proportion of other donor countries on average. Humanitarian aid is one of the world's great success stories, for the number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped by half since 1990, and more than 120 million children's lives have been saved in that period. Consider Thomas Awiapo, whose parents died when he was a child growing up in northern Ghana. Two of his younger brothers died, apparently of malnutrition. Then Thomas heard that a local school was offering meals for students, a "schoolfeeding program" supported by U.S.A.I.D., the American aid agency, and Catholic Relief Services. Thomas went to the school and was offered daily meals — on the condition that he enroll. "I kept going to that little village school, just for the food," he told me. He became a brilliant student, went to college and earned a master's degree in the U.S. Today he works for Catholic Relief Services in Ghana, having decided he wants to devote his life to giving back. Kristof asked him what he thought of the Trump budget cutting foreign assistance. "When I hear that aid has been cut, I'm so sad," he answered. "Thatfood saved my life." So why is the Trump Administration cutting funding for food programs that could have save young Udal's and other innocent lives? For those of you who call yourself Christians, if you don't feel this pain you are hypocrites. As such, hopefully the above picture of Udal inspires you to press your representatives and the Trump Administration to do the right thing because the lives of millions of innocent people are seriously in danger. The Dollar Price of a Bullet Gun injuries cost Americans $730 million a year in hospital bills Inline image 1 Surgeons at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center operate on a gunshot victim. A new study estimates that over eight years, the country spent more than $6.6 billion on hospital bills related to gun injuries, with the federal EFTA00633237  government picking up $2.7 billion of that tab. Americans paid more than $6.6 billion over eight years to care for victims of gun violence, according to a new tally of hospital bills. And U.S. taxpayers picked up at least 41% of that tab say the authors of a study published this week in the American Journal of Public Health. Their sum does not include the initial — and very costly — bill for gunshot victims' care in emergency rooms. Nor does it include hospital readmissions to treat complications or provide follow-up care. The cost of rehabilitation, or of ongoing disability, is not included either. "These are big numbers, and this is the lowest bound of these costs," said Sarabeth A. Spitzer, a Stanford University medical student who co-wrote the study. "We were surprised" at the scale, she added. That, arguably, makes gun-injury prevention a public health priority, Spitzer said. The GOP's healthcare reform measure would reduce federal contributions toward Medicaid, which foots roughly 35% of the hospital bills for gunshot victims. The GOP plan would also cut payments to the hospitals that absorb much of the cost of caring for self-paying (in other words, uninsured) patients, whose hospital bills accounted for about 24% of the $73o million-per-year tab. The new research underscores many grim facts of gun violence in the United States: In 2014, for instance, 33,700 people died of gunshot wounds, but an additional 81,000 were treated for nonfatal firearms injuries. Close to two-thirds of the gun deaths were self-inflicted, and those who commit suicide with a gun rarely survive long enough to be admitted to a hospital. To come up with their tally, Spitzer and her colleagues scoured the hospital bills of 267,265 patients across the country who were injured by guns between 2006 and 2014. These patients were overwhelmingly male, and most of them were admitted to large, urban teaching hospitals. About 43% of the victims were treated in the South, where the proportion of uninsured patients was highest. And nationally, 30% of gunshot victims treated in hospitals during the study period were insured by Medicaid. "Firearm-related injuries place a particular burden on governmental payers and the poor," the study authors wrote. In addition to the 29% of patients nationwide who were insured by Medicaid, which largely serves low-income and disabled Americans, more than 4 out of 5 of the uninsured patients "fell below the 5oth income percentile." This group is unlikely to be able to pay their medical bills, and so these costs are often written off as losses to the hospitals that provide the care. The cost of keeping those hospitals open, in turn, is typically borne by taxpayers in the form of local tax levies or block grants to the states. Until now, the most recent estimate of the cost of firearm injuries extended only through 1997 and used hospital data from only two states. That's very likely because in 1996, gun rights advocates on Capitol Hill began forbidding the use of federal funds "to advocate or promote gun control" and federal funds to conduct research on firearms injuries virtually dried up. While the Obama administration last year proposed a welter of initiatives to reduce gun injuries, few are likely to be funded by a GOP-led Congress. Without a doubt, gun vio