News Releases

ELLEN SHAFFER
Shaffer is co-director at the Center for Policy Analysis. She said today: “President Obama has announced that he will propose a budget plan on April 10 that would cut Social Security benefits and increase Medicare deductibles.

“Congress and the President must protect these lifelines for seniors, people with disabilities. These cuts would be especially harmful to the health of women, who live longer but have lower incomes. The “chained CPI” would cut payments to women in their 80s by the cost of three months of groceries a year. Additionally, women of color, who already experience a host of health disparities and difficulties in accessing critical health services would be disproportionately impacted by any erosion of Medicare or Medicaid. Such cuts would force women ages 65-67 to neglect needed health care, worsening chronic conditions throughout their lives. Reduced income support would force many elderly women without family or friends as caregivers to spend down to qualify for Medicaid, and experience medically unnecessary confinement in nursing homes as a result.

“Social Security has absolutely nothing to do with causing the deficit, so cutting it won’t help to reduce the deficit. The Social Security Trust Fund is entirely solvent through 2038, requiring only minor tweaks in the interim to extend into the future. Medicare and Medicaid are affected by health care cost increases, but cutting benefits will not solve those problems.

“On Nov. 6, women and communities of color gave the margin of victory to a President and members of Congress who promised to fight for higher taxes on the wealthy, for more public investment and for careful cuts in spending, while revitalizing the economy. It is unconscionable to ask those who are barely making it to be squeezed even tighter at a time when corporations and the wealthiest 2% are not paying their fair share of taxes, despite soaring profits.”

The Associated Press reported yesterday: “At the start of what could be a new era in police surveillance, an Illinois legislator is proposing a limit on how law enforcement agencies can use drones highly sophisticated, unmanned aircraft that authorities are eyeing for aerial surveillance.”

SHAHID BUTTAR
NADIA KAYYALI
Buttar is executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, which just released two model ordinances to assist local communities in the battle against domestic surveillance drones across the US. Kayyali is a legal fellow with the group. Buttar said today: “Because the legal landscape governing drones is essentially barren, law enforcement agencies around the country are currently making policy to suit their interests. But we live in a constitutional Republic, meaning that We the People hold the opportunity — and responsibility — to petition our local representatives for legal protections that Congress is too timid to provide.

“Together, BORDC’s two models satisfy diverse interests. One creates a drone-free zone, while the second model establishes rigorous requirements limiting their use by law enforcement agencies and other public officials. The model regulating drone use (rather than prohibiting it entirely) allows drones to be used pursuant to a judicially issued warrant as well as for non-law enforcement purposes such as fire detection, hazardous material spill response, search & rescue, and natural disaster response.

“Beyond addressing constitutional concerns, the legislation also responds to safety concerns. For instance: [M]any of the drone models currently available to law enforcement have limited flying time, cannot be flown in inclement weather, must be flown in sight of an operator, and can only be flown during the day, thus making them ill-suited to search and rescue missions and best suited for pervasive surveillance.”

The model legislation is available online:
http://constitutioncampaign.org/campaigns/resources//DronesAnnotated.pdf (annotated)
http://constitutioncampaign.org/campaigns/resources//Drones.pdf

April 9th is ‘Equal Pay Day’ symbolizing how far past the new year women must work in order to simply receive the same salary men earn in only 12 months.

BARBARA GAULT via Caroline Dobuzinskis
Gault is vice president and executive director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She said today: “While women are starting to make gains with good earnings in many occupations women are still more than twice as likely as men to work in occupations with poverty wages. Even when working the same jobs, women tend to earn less than men leading to less economic security for women and their families.”

JEFFREY HAYES, PH.D. via Caroline Dobuzinskis
Hayes is a senior research associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. He said today: “According to our research, it will take another 45 years to close the wage gap between women and men. Progress on this issue has stalled and more programs and policies are needed to ensure that women are not receiving lower pay for doing the same work as men.”

MICHELE LEBER
Leber is chair of the National Committee on Pay Equity. She said today: “When the National Committee on Pay Equity established Equal Pay Day in 1996, women earned 74 cents for eavery dollar men earned, based on the median wages of all full-time, year-round workers as reported by the Census Bureau. In the latest Census figures, women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn – not much progress in 17 years. We urge Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act (S.84, H.R.377) to strengthen and update the Equal Pay Act signed into law nearly 50 years ago and to help close the wage gap.”

Ten years after U.S. forces cemented their victory over Iraq by toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, Iraqis continue to flee their country, adding to the estimated 4 million displaced by the war and occupation. The Progressive magazine has a new report on the largest community of Iraqi refugees in the United States who’ve fled as a result of the U.S. war and occupation.

ARUN GUPTA, @arunindy
Author of the piece, Gupta co-founded The Indypendent newspaper and The Occupied Wall Street Journal. He is a regular contributor to The Progressive, Truthout, In These Times and The Guardian. He recently travelled to El Cajon, California, a bedroom community east of San Diego, where more than 12,000 Iraqis have arrived since 2008, after the government relaxed restrictions. He writes, “Many Iraqis in El Cajon worked for the U.S. government in Iraq and fled with their families after their lives were threatened. In return they expected a warm welcome and a decent standard of living when they arrived. Instead they were in for a rude awakening. Their meager monthly stipend means they get the worst apartments in El Cajon, a city with a 23 percent poverty rate, and have to rely on donations for furniture. Almost all are traumatized from the violence they experienced, but they are told to get jobs right away or they will lose their benefits. With 11 percent unemployment in the city they take jobs no one else will—fast food, housecleaning, parking-lot attendants. Many are doctors, accounts and engineers.

Social workers say, “You look at their faces. They are so proud of their degrees and their experience, and then they are told to clean sixteen hotel rooms a day. The refugees need more aid, more educational programs, cultural orientation and time to recover and adjust.” Gupta adds, “Of Iraqi adults who’ve arrived since 2009, 67 percent are unemployed. In a time of austerity many Iraqis are nearing the four-year limit of welfare assistance, and worry they will wind up homeless, living on the sidewalk.”

SALAM HASSAN
A thirty-seven-old-year computer engineer living in Berkeley, Hassan served as a fixer in Baghdad for journalists like Naomi Klein, Dahr Jamail, and Christian Parenti before escaping mortal danger in 2005. He said single male refugees in the Bay Area wind up in West Oakland, “famous for violent history, because it’s poor, and the rent is cheaper.” Hassan, who has taken so many refugees under his wing that his apartment was dubbed “the Iraqi Embassy,” says they are packed “three to four people per one-bedroom apartment. They get four months assistance, then are switched to a program that just covers their rent and $200 a month for food stamps.”

Reuters is reporting: “The United States said on Wednesday it would soon send a missile defense system to Guam to defend it from North Korea, as the U.S. military adjusts to what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has called a ‘real and clear danger’ from Pyongyang.”

CHRISTINE HONG
Hong is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

HYUN LEE
Lee is a member of the Working Group on Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific as well as the National Campaign to End the Korean War. She also co-hosts Asia Pacific Forum, a weekly radio show on culture and politics of Asia and the Asian diaspora.

Hong and Lee recently co-wrote “Lurching Towards War: A Post-Mortem on Strategic Patience.”

Today they said: “The escalation of military threats and tensions on and around the Korean peninsula point to a resurgence of war as a plausible scenario involving the same national actors and international alliances central to the Korean War—the United States and South Korea, on the one hand, and North Korea and China, on the other.

“What has gone underreported in U.S. media is China’s readiness posture. China has placed its military on high alert in the event of an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula. In a move reminiscent of its entry into the Korean War, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has increased troop presence, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and air patrols along its border with North Korea. In a show of support for North Korea, China has been holding live-firing naval exercises in the West Sea, a site of recurring tensions between the two Koreas.

“Yesterday, General James Thurman, commander of U.S. military forces in South Korea, conceded that, in these circumstances, miscalculation could trigger ‘a kinetic provocation.’ Yet, in U.S. media, all blame has gone to North Korea, which U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel describes as ‘a clear and present danger.’ During a press briefing last Thursday, when asked whether U.S. deployment of B-2 stealth bombers to the Korean peninsula for a practice sortie was provocative, Hagel stated that “we, the United States and South Korea, have not been involved in provocating [sic]” North Korea.

“The facts suggest otherwise. In addition to the bombers, the ships, and the stealth fighters that it has recently deployed to the region, the United States, in the wake of the death of Kim Jong Il and President Barack Obama’s announcement of a U.S. ‘pivot’ to Asia and the Pacific, has quietly intensified the danger of war on the Korean peninsula. Jointly with South Korea, it has openly exercised OPLAN 5029, a U.S. war plan that simulates regime collapse in and U.S. occupation of North Korea. It transferred mine-resistant armored vehicles used in Afghanistan and Iraq to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and announced the completion of super nuclear bunker busters for use against North Korea. It also increased South Korea’s ballistic missile range to enable its ally to strike North Korea.

“In response to these developments, Kim Jong Un, in a speech before the central committee of the Workers’ Party on Sunday, described nuclear weapons as ‘a guarantee to protect [North Korea’s] sovereignty.’ North Korea has routinely pointed to Iraq, Libya, and Syria as case studies in U.S. regime change policy. Describing its own actions as self-defense, North Korea nullified the 1953 Korean War Armistice Agreement that brought active fighting to a halt but did not end the war. It pointed to the agreement’s centrality to a permanent war system that has forced North Korea ‘to divert large human and material resources to bolstering up the armed forces though they should have been directed to the economic development and improvement of people’s living standard.’””

Bob Schaeffer
Schaeffer is the Public Education Director of FairTest, fair and open testing. He has been tracking cheating scandals around the nation for the past several years and has collected a huge database of information about specific cases. He said today: “Atlanta is the ‘tip of an iceberg’ in a sea of standardized test score manipulation that has swept the U.S. in response to politically mandated misuses of standardized exams.

“A new FairTest survey reports that cheating incidents been confirmed in 37 states and the District of Columbia in just the past four academic years. In addition, it lists more than 50 ways adults in public schools artificially boost test scores.

“The solution to the school test score manipulation problem is not simply stepped up enforcement. Instead, testing misuses must end because they cheat the public out of accurate data about public school quality at the same time they cheat many students out of a high-quality education.”

A campaign for revoking President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize got underway today with a petition launched by a quarter-million member online group.

The petition, initiated by RootsAction.org, can be viewed along with a real-time tally of signers and their comments at: http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7647

Noting that the Obama administration “has widened the use of drones and other instruments of remote killing in several countries,” RootsAction said in a mass email today that “President Obama has made perpetual war look more perpetual than ever.”

Obama accepted the Nobel award 40 months ago with a December 2009 speech in Oslo.

The following policy analysts are available for interviews:

LEAH BOLGER
Bolger, CDR, USN (Ret), is past president of Veterans for Peace. She said today: “When the Nobel Committee gave the Peace Prize to President Obama in 2009, for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,’ many criticized that decision, calling it premature and politically motivated. President Carter, himself a Nobel Laureate, called the decision ‘a bold statement of international support for his vision and commitment to peace and harmony in international relations.’ Since then, President Obama has emphatically disproven Carter’s belief by dramatically escalating the war in Afghanistan, killing thousands of innocent people with illegal drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere, and continuing to hold prisoners at Guantanamo.

Bolger added: “The Nobel Committee has deeply diminished the prize by awarding it to Obama in the first place; it is now obvious . . . that they made a serious mistake. The Committee needs to revoke the prize in order to restore its value.”

COLEEN ROWLEY
Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the Minneapolis field office, wrote a “whistleblower” memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures. She says that the influential Nobel Committee Secretary Geir Lundestad “has repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to explain how it is to be expected that the 2009 recipient Obama would be engaged in two wars as leader of the world’s ‘superpower.’ So, how can the Prize continue to inspire peacemaking when it no longer is in keeping with Alfred Nobel’s original intent but instead has been turned on its head to promote militarism and war?”

Rowley also commented: “During the last five years the dispute over the implementation of Nobel’s prize for the ‘champions of peace’ has come to a head. The Norwegian awarders seem to reinterpret Nobel’s wishes and award the prize for whatever in their judgment is good and valuable, based on their own ‘broad concept of peace.’”

Rowley retired from the FBI in 2004 and is now a public speaker and writer. She interviewed Nobel Secretary Lundestad a year ago, when he was in Minnesota for the “Nobel Peace Forum.” For background, see Rowley’s 2012 Huffington Post article “Nothing ‘Purist’ — Just Everything Hypocritical About Awarding Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize to Promote Western Militarism”

NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon, who wrote the book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He said today: “If President Obama is to remain as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, then Bernie Madoff may as well be Financial Planner of the Year.”

The New York Times reports: “New York City is poised to mandate that thousands of companies provide paid time off for sick employees, bolstering a national movement that has been resisted by wary business leaders. …The legislation would eventually force companies with at least 15 employees to give full-time workers five compensated days off a year when they are ill, a requirement that advocates said would allow much of the city’s labor force to stay home from work without fear of losing a day’s wage — or worse, a job. The advocates said the legislation would provide paid sick leave for one million New Yorkers who do not currently have such benefits.”

This March, Portland, OR became the fourth city to adopt paid sick days, and the Philadelphia’s City Council voted to pass a similar measure. Statewide bills are moving forward in Vermont and Massachusetts. Residents of Orange County, FL should be able to vote for sick days in August 2014 due to 50,000 voters who petitioned for the ballot initiative.

These recent wins and active campaigns build on past victories in Connecticut, which passed the first statewide law in 2011, Seattle in 2011, Washington DC in 2008, San Francisco in 2006, and a November 2012 ballot initiative in Long Beach, California granting sick days to hotel workers. At the federal level, Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Tom Harkin introduced the Healthy Families Act this March, which would set a national sick days standard.

ELLEN BRAVO

Bravo is the Executive Director of Family Values @ Work, a national network of city and state coalitions, including the coalition in New York City, working for family-friendly workplace policies. She said today: “Nearly a million New Yorkers will no longer have to choose between following doctor’s orders and putting food on the table or keeping the lights on. Making sure that working people have money in their pockets to cover the basics is good economics for all of us.

“This victory continues the momentum spurred by recent wins in Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia. We know New York’s coalition will continue the fight until every single New Yorker has access to paid sick days—just as the movement to value families at work continues across the country.

“This month, Portland, OR became the fourth city to adopt paid sick days, and the Philadelphia’s City Council voted to pass a similar measure. Statewide bills are moving forward in Vermont and Massachusetts. Residents of Orange County, FL should be able to vote for sick days in August 2014 thanks to 50,000 voters who petitioned for the ballot initiative.

“We hope Mayor Nutter will listen to the Daily News and change his mind about the bill, as their editorial staff did, because of the economy. Workers are still reeling from lost jobs and stagnant wages. Earned sick time means they’ll have more money in their pockets to cover the basics – a boost to them and their families and to the economy.”

During the past week, more than 30,000 Americans have signed a petition urging a Nobel Peace Prize for U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, the whistleblower who was arrested nearly three years ago on charges that he provided an enormous quantity of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

The petition, addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee and posted online, already includes several thousand comments from signers who explain why they want a Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to Manning: http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7612

JEFF COHEN
Co-founder of the online group RootsAction.org, which launched the petition for a Nobel Peace Prize for Manning on March 25, Cohen said today: “If we begin from the original intentions for the Nobel Peace Prize, then an obvious top candidate is Bradley Manning, a young soldier and whistleblower who risked life in prison to inform Americans and the world about U.S. execution of, and preparation for, seemingly endless war. It’s not mere rhetoric to suggest that Private Manning has been — in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will — ‘the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies . . .’”

Cohen is founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, where he is an associate professor of journalism. He is a former political pundit on national TV and the author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”

Reuters reports: “Thousands of demonstrators rallied in downtown Chicago on Wednesday to protest the city’s plan to close 54 public schools, primarily in Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods.” See: news stories and videos.

PAULINE LIPMAN
Professor of educational policy studies at the College of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Lipman is author of The New Political Economy of Urban Education Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. She said today: “The massive school closings proposed in Chicago are an assault on African American public education and on black communities. Disinvestment, destabilization, and disenfranchisement — that’s school ‘reform’ for black children.” Lipman has criticized the “appointed Board of Education, comprised of bankers, CEOs, and real estate magnates” in Chicago.

ELAINE WEISS
Weiss is national coordinator of Broader Bolder Approach to Education. She just co-wrote the piece “Closing Schools Despite the Data,” which states: “Mayors and reformers would have us believe that school closures, like the 54 recently announced in Chicago, will save districts money while improving outcomes for students who are moved out of ‘failing’ schools. The problem is, districts have been closing schools for many years — in Chicago, for over a decade — and it’s clear that they won’t accomplish these goals. In fact, the opposite has happened.

“According to the Consortium for Chicago School Research, a leading research authority on education in Chicago, Arne Duncan’s closure of dozens of schools as part of Renaissance 2010 provided no benefit to students, since the vast majority were simply transferred from one low-performing school to another. A recent brief on closures from CReATE notes actual damage — transferred students, who felt stigmatized, had lower test scores and higher risks of dropping out. The Consortium did find improved outcomes for the six percent who landed in academically strong schools and found supportive teachers, but that doesn’t help the 94 percent who stagnated or lost ground, nor make up for the disruption to those children and families. It does not compensate for the spikes in violence when established gang routes were disrupted, nor for the inability of other schools to cope with repeated influxes of new, struggling students (some moved four times in just three years). …

“The damage isn’t limited to Chicago. In Washington, D.C., where Chancellor Kaya Henderson recently announced the impending closure of 15 more schools, impacts from prior closures are no more promising. One of Henderson predecessor Michelle Rhee’s first decisions as Chancellor of DCPS was the closure of 23 ‘low-performing’ and ‘under-enrolled’ schools. Parents and policymakers were told that closing the schools would save the district $23 million that could be used to hire more teachers and enact new programs, and that students affected could move to better schools. After the closures, Rhee reported that the total cost had been less than $10 million. However, an audit put the price tag at closer to $40 million — no savings, lots of unanticipated costs — not even accounting for the loss of an estimated $5 million in revenue when parents switched to charter schools as a result of the closures, nor the added burden to families of transporting children to farther-away schools. Moreover, on average, students’ new schools had even lower odds of making Annual Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind than the schools they were moved out of. The closures simply resulted in longer commutes, higher costs for struggling families, and fewer incentives for disengaged students to stay in school.”