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The British gender pay gap has remained stubbornly high ever since the government legislated to force employers to publish their yearly numbers.

The Office for National Statistics put it at 8.9 per cent for full-time employees last year. If also found that women are paid an average of £380,000 over their lifetimes compared with £643,000 for men.

That's a mismatch that ought to appal anyone with a belief in equality and social justice, regardless of their gender.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

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Employers should stop forcing women to demand better pay

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The British gender pay gap has remained stubbornly high ever since the government legislated to force employers to publish their yearly numbers. The Office for National Statistics put it at 8.9 per cent for full-time employees last year. If also found that women are paid an average of £380,000 over their lifetimes compared with £643,000 for men.

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Virginia finalized its

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virgina

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See all the wonderful things Rick Rexroth has made

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When will women get equal pay? Not for another 257 years, report says

At current rates of change, the global gender pay gap will close in 257 years, according to the World Economic Forum. That's even worse than last year, when the organization estimated it would take 202 years to close the gap.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/20/gender-pay-gap-equal-wages-expected-257-years-report/2699326001/

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Not all patients with lung cancer have equal opportunity for a screening or treatment.
https://www.total-croatia-news.com/lifestyle/40875-lung-cancer-screening

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3281548/ Only two of the 20 actors and actresses nominated were people of color and no female director was nominated this year. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/2020-oscar-nominations-show-the-academy-has-an-issue-with-diversity.html

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https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/480172-virginia-ratifies-equal-rights-amendment

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People in the united states are the most unsatisfied that they have ever been with our government
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/confidence-democracy-lowest-point-record/605686/

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Virginia became final state needed to ratify equal rights amendment, to guarantee equal rights for women.

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Virginia has officially become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its General Assembly took the final procedural steps Monday to sign off on the measure, with women presiding over both chambers.

The move comes 12 days after the state Senate and House of Delegates made history by backing the women's rights measure. The amendment's passage in Virginia crosses the threshold necessary for it to be included in the U.S. Constitution, though legal experts are divided on if the ERA can still move forward.

The ERA would ban discrimination on the basis of sex and guarantee equality for women under the Constitution.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) praised the action, tweeting "Today marks a new ERA for the women of this country and this Commonwealth - finally, equality for women under the United States Constitution."

The vote comes decades after Congress sent the ERA to the states in 1972, passing it with bipartisan support.

But there are big legal questions as to whether the amendment will be enshrined into the Constitution.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a concluding that because the 1982 deadline for ratification has expired, it is too late for states to ratify the ERA. The department said the only option for supporters now is to kick off the ratification process all over again in Congress.

The National Archives, which certifies the ratification of constitutional amendments, said it would abide by that opinion, unless otherwise directed by a final court order.

CNN reports there are efforts in Congress to restart the ratification process and get rid of the deadline. The House will vote on Feb. 10 on whether to rescind the deadline.

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Virginia finalizes its passage of the Equal Rights Amendment

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Virginia has officially become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its General Assembly took the final procedural steps Monday to sign off on the measure, with women presiding over both chambers. The move comes 12 days after the state Senate and House of Delegates made history by backing the women's rights measure.

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According to researchers from Cambridge University, global dissatisfaction with democracy is at an all time low.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/global-dissatisfaction-with-democracy-at-a-record-high-research-says.html

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House passes bill in support of Tibet human rights

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Virginia is trying to pass a new equal rights amendment for everyone

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/01/29/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-equal-rights-amendment/

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West Virginia Governor supports pro-gun rally with over 22,000 people.

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The governor of West Virginia, in a stunning move that echoes the Civil War-era creation of his state, on Tuesday invited Virginia counties upset with Richmond's liberal, anti-gun turn to shift borders and join his state.

"If you out there, no matter where you be, Virginia or wherever you may be, as an individual or a business or whatever, West Virginia is waiting for you with open arms," said Gov. Jim Justice.

"You will never ever regret it," he added at a press conference in Martinsburg, West Virginia, 13 miles from the border with a Virginia county where some officials are open to joining West Virginia.

He also said that West Virginia embraces President Trump, who is despised by many federal workers in Northern Virginia that have a big impact on statewide elections. "We should be thankful for all he's done," he said.

Justice's statement endorsing secession was an unexpected but ringing endorsement of legislation before the West Virginia legislature that would let Virginia border counties join the state.

It has become such a hot topic along the border that the White House and President Trump are paying attention to it, according to sources.

It was offered as a long-shot package by Republican Del. Gary Howell after the Virginia voters put their legislature in Democratic hands for the first time in years. In just a few weeks, they have voted for several liberal initiatives including gun control, prompting a massive 22,000-strong, pro-gun rally at the capital in Richmond.

Howell now has 40 of 100 delegates as co-signers, and the legislation has jumped in importance. What's more, he has a team looking at how West Virginia would admit Virginia counties. Also in the West Virginia Senate, Sen. Charles Trump has offered a resolution urging Frederick County to join West Virginia.

Over 90% of Virginia's counties have already moved to split from Richmond's campaign for gun control, creating gun "sanctuaries" and potentially paving the way for other anti-Richmond votes.

Justice was joined by Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University in rural Lynchburg, Virginia, and a close Trump ally.

While Justice promoted the freedoms West Virginia offers to conservative, pro-Trump Virginians who now feel ignored, Falwell ripped the new majority in Richmond and backed efforts by border counties to vote to leave in the upcoming election.

"Democrat leaders in Richmond, through their elitism and radicalism, have left a nearly unrecognizable state in their wake," said Falwell in his statement.

"The Democrats are anti-life, anti-Second Amendment, anti-liberty, and even anti-business with their oppressive environmental regulations," he added.

Justice, in his prepared remarks, made a comparison to the 1861 creation of West Virginia, when northern Virginia counties split over the issues that led to the Civil War.

"Long ago, the infringement of fundamental values is what led to the formation of our great state. The government in Richmond demonstrated it was out of step with the citizens in the western part of Virginia," he said. "This year, West Virginia's legislature has shown interest in renewing our historic 1861 invitation and extending it to all Virginia counties who want to join all the wonderful things that are happening in West Virginia," he said.

"I invite you to come join us and grow with West Virginia. If you want the freedom that West Virginia has to offer, where our guns make our communities safer, and our natural environment adds to our quality of life and provides us the means to make a good living, come grow with us," added the governor in his statement.

Falwell is urging quick action by disgruntled counties and sees the issue as a good one for Republicans in the 2020 election, even among younger voters in part because Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam is targeting support for online students.

"The threat from the radical left is real, and it's spreading across the country and tearing our national family apart from the seams, but we have a rare opportunity to make history in our time by pushing back against tyranny in Washington and in Richmond," he said, adding, "We need a state government that is not elected by federal workers in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., that will protect our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and I believe West Virginia will do just that."

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'Join us,' West Virginia governor urges pro-gun, pro-Trump Virginia counties

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The governor of West Virginia, in a stunning move that echoes the Civil War-era creation of his state, on Tuesday invited Virginia counties upset with Richmond's liberal, anti-gun turn to shift borders and join his state.

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its when their is an opportunity for an easir retirement plan

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Retirement saving plays an important role in the U.S. economy. Americans hold more than $18 trillion in private retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs, while defined benefit pensions in the private and public sector hold trillions more. Social Security and Medicare comprise nearly 40 percent of the federal budget. The government also provides tax subsidies for retirement saving, and funds Medicaid, which covers elder long-term care. Retirement issues will only become more important in the future, as the population ages, the Baby Boom retires, lifespans increase, and health care costs rise. ¹

Yet despite existing research, policymakers do not have access to robust empirical consensus when making decisions that affect the retirement security of tens of millions of families. There are many major outstanding questions:

How well are households preparing for retirement? Are Americans failing to accumulate enough wealth to support themselves in retirement, or are retirement saving shortfalls small and declining?²

Why does consumption fall at retirement? Does this indicate that retirees aren't saving enough, or does it reflect their ability to secure the same quality of life with fewer expenditures?³

Do tax-based saving incentives raise net wealth accumulation? Do the effects vary by saver characteristics and plan design? To what extent is the substantial flow of contributions into 401(k)s and IRAs a net addition to saving, as opposed to saving that would have been done anyway, in other forms?⁴

What policies boost saving? Would improving financial literacy or mandating saving be effective?⁵ Are there retirement saving programs that raise participation and increase overall wealth accumulation?⁶

Why do households consistently make retirement financing decisions that do not appear to be in their own best interest? For example, why do households buy fewer annuities and reverse mortgages than expected?⁷ Why don't more retirees boost expected lifetime benefits by waiting longer to claim Social Security?⁸ Are these choices rationally dictated by either unobserved preferences or imperfect markets? Or are they irrational responses that are better explained by a variety of decision-making biases?

Obtaining better answers to these questions and using the insights they provide to guide changes in the American retirement system could improve living standards for generations of retirees and control the federal budget. But to obtain these answers, researchers and policy makers need better information. There are several major sources of data on U.S. households' saving and wealth, including several large-scale surveys administered by academic or public institutions. These data sets have proven useful for examining many questions but are not comprehensive or extensive enough to generate evidence that can conclusively address the major outstanding questions in retirement policy.

To generate compelling results, researchers need more than access to more comprehensive data- they must also employ better study designs. The research design most conducive to drawing causal inference is the randomized control trial (RCT), where subjects are randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. ⁹ For example, one of us (Gale) has used an RCT to study the homeownership outcomes of those who used Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). ¹⁰ The five-year analysis and the ten-year follow-up found that IDAs accelerate home buying but do not materially affect long-term rates of homeownership-a crucial assessment that helped shift advocates' efforts to help low-income households to other strategies.

But RCTs are not always easy to implement, and researchers often focus instead on "quasi-experimental" research designs or "natural experiments" induced by policy changes or other exogenous events. These research strategies certainly have advantages, but at times the results are hard to interpret because it is unclear what would have happened in the absence of the policy. In any case, the results of well-designed studies are harder to ignore. They can have greater impact on policymakers' decisions because, unencumbered by contorted methodology, the findings inspire greater confidence and understanding in researchers and lawmakers alike.

In the absence of such robust studies, it hardly surprising that almost no retirement policymaking is rooted in evidence; programs simply continue indefinitely with little or no Congressional oversight. Federal tax expenditures for retirement saving-which totaled $252 billion in 2018-have never been formally evaluated, while the Social Security Administration devotes less than 1 percent of its administrative budget to research and evaluation. ¹¹ Because public institutions do not formally evaluate their own programs, academic and think-tank economists provide most of the existing analyses, which are limited by the accessible data, as noted above. Using federal dollars to most efficiently improve retirement security requires building consensus around what makes effective policy-an impossible task without robust and transparent research methods, empirical replication, and the comprehensive data these processes rely upon.

Strengthening the link between expert consensus and political action could create greater demand for this invaluable data. The federal government has already taken important steps towards implementing a more evidence-based policymaking infrastructure through the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, passed earlier this year, which creates new government entities devoted to data sharing and evaluation, while also dramatically increasing researchers' access to administrative data. ¹² In addition, in recent years policymakers have adopted some evidence-based policy mechanisms, like Pay for Success and tiered grantmaking, designed to funnel federal dollars to programs with demonstrated effectiveness. ¹³ These initiatives present opportunities to learn about and improve existing retirement programs, but they also generate a host of new issues, like who decides what constitutes good evidence. But despite these programs, the vast bulk of federal dollars and tax expenditures are awarded without an explicit connection to evidence.

***
The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. None of the authors is currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article. The authors are not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.

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William G. Gale, Benjamin H. Harris, and Claire Haldeman

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Evidence-based retirement policy: Necessity and opportunity

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Retirement saving plays an important role in the U.S. economy. Americans hold more than $18 trillion in private retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs, while defined benefit pensions in the private and public sector hold trillions more. Social Security and Medicare comprise nearly 40 percent of the federal budget.

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The confidence in democracy is at a low.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/confidence-democracy-lowest-point-record/605686/

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IKEA U.S. Earns Top Marks in 2020 Corporate Equality Index

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation is the educational arm of America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender and queer people

https://www.furnituretoday.com/ft-bulletin-board/ikea-u-s-earns-top-marks-in-2020-corporate-equality-index/

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Supreme Court religious rights case has big implications for U.S. schools

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite wondering every autumn whether she can afford it, Kendra Espinoza has worked hard to keep her two daughters in a small private Christian school in Kalispell, Montana, costing about $15,000 annually for them to attend.

Even with some financial support from the school Espinoza, a single mother, still has a sizable tuition bill to pay. She decided against sending the girls, ages 14 and 11, to local public schools that would be free to attend. On top of her full-time office manager job, Espinoza has worked nights as a janitor in an office building to help pay for tuition, taking her daughters along to instill in them a strong work ethic.

If you want something enough in life, Espinoza said, you have to fight for it.

"The way I try to raise my girls, of course I want them to be able to read the Bible and be taught how to pray, taught from that faith-based perspective," Espinoza said in an interview. "At the public school, there's a lot of disrespect and not enough of those values that I wanted them to learn."

Espinoza, 47, is a plaintiff in a major religious rights case that will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. She and two other mothers of students at Stillwater Christian School are appealing a lower court ruling that struck down a Montana state tax credit that could help students pay to attend private schools including religious ones.

A 2015 Montana law provided people a tax credit of up to $150 for donations to groups that fund scholarships for private school tuition. State tax officials limited the program to non-religious schools in order to comport with the state constitution, which forbids public aid to any "church, sect or denomination." Thirty-eight states have such constitutional provisions.

But the Montana Supreme Court struck down the scholarship program entirely because it could be used to pay for religious schools.

"This is grossly unfair to any parents of kids who go to religious school," said Espinoza, who is represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group. "It's not fair to us to be excluded (from) funds available to the general public."

The Supreme Court's ruling in the case, due by the end of June, could narrow the separation of church and state.

In their appeal to the nine justices, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that Montana's decision to exclude religious school students from the scholarship program violated their rights under the U.S. Constitution to free exercise of religion and equal protection under the law.

It is an argument that could find favor with the court, which has a 5-4 conservative majority.

Under the Montana program, individuals could donate to a scholarship fund organization and receive up to a $150 tax credit. The one scholarship organization that currently exists provides $500 scholarships, primarily to needy students.

Proponents of religious school funding contend that the no-aid to religious institutions provisions in place in 38 states are so-called Blaine amendments, written into the majority of state constitutions in the 19th century as a form of anti-Catholic discrimination.

Montana disagrees, noting that the state adopted a new constitution in 1972 and kept the no-aid provision, believing it would protect religious freedom by preventing the government from gaining influence over religious schools and weakening public schools.

President Donald Trump's administration is backing the plaintiffs in the case. The Republican president, seeking re-election on Nov. 3, enjoys strong support among evangelical Christian voters. At a rally in Florida this month he pledged to bring prayer to public schools.

Though the plaintiffs are asking the justices to rule in their favor on the tax credit program, Trump's administration has a broader goal in mind: knocking out state constitution no-aid provisions.

"Because the no-aid provision contravenes the U.S. Constitution, the state court had no authority to enforce it," Solicitor General Noel Francisco said in a court filing.

Opponents of government support for religion as well as public educators have expressed alarm at the possible ramifications of a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.

Such a decision could lead to the unprecedented outcome of requiring state funding for religious education or other activities, said Rachel Laser, president of the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"The question before the court is whether states can continue to protect their citizens' religious freedom by ensuring that public money not be used to fund religious education and discrimination. The answer must be yes," Laser said.

Expanding tax credits and vouchers for private education takes scarce resources away from public education, added Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, a union that represents public school teachers nationwide.

The case is "an obvious attempt to use the Supreme Court to move this political agenda," she said.

Eighteen other states have tax-credit programs like the one ended in Montana, supporting around 250,000 students, according to a court filing. Most private schools in those states are religious.

Espinoza's case could give the justices an opportunity to build on a major 2017 religious rights ruling in favor of a Missouri church that challenged its exclusion from state playground improvement grants generally available to other nonprofit groups. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that churches and other religious entities cannot be flatly denied public money even in states where constitutions explicitly ban such funding.

"People will say that they're afraid of religion being pushed down their throat but I don't believe that's an issue in this case," Espinoza said. "If funds are donated by private citizens to a private organization, just because they have a tax credit attached doesn't make them public funds."

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judicial process / court cases / court decisions

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Supreme Court religious rights case has big implications for U.S. schools

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite wondering every autumn whether she can afford it, Kendra Espinoza has worked hard to keep her two daughters in a small private Christian school in Kalispell, Montana, costing about $15,000 annually for them to attend. Even with some financial support from the school Espinoza, a single mother, still has a sizable tuition bill to pay.

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The Equal Rights Amendment could soon become part of the Constitution, but experts are divided on whether it would be a boon or a bust for women’s finances. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-equal-rights-amendment-mandates-equality-between-the-sexes-so-why-are-some-women-against-it-2020-01-22

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the satisfaction with democracy has been dropping over the past decade.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/confidence-democracy-lowest-point-record/605686/

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ADOS advocate that only descendants of slavery should be getting economic equality, separating this population from the black community as a whole.

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American Descendants of Slavery advocates are stirring debate and anger online.

Reparations and the lingering racial wealth gap have been conversations largely within the black American community. Both issues have received wider attention of late, particularly among the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates.

All the Democratic presidential candidates, except for former Vice President Joe Biden, said they support legislation to at least study the issue of reparations. Only Marianne Williamson, who recently ended her presidential campaign, said she fully supports reparations, in the amount of $200 billion to $500 billion. Biden has not endorsed any reparations legislation.

And reparations and black economics have been addressed at some of the recent Democratic debates.

"I didn't anticipate that, today, we would be having the most active national conversation about reparations since the Reconstruction Era," said William A. "Sandy" Darity, Jr., Ph.D., an economist and professor of public policy at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.

The national spotlight on economic injustice is also giving rise to a new wave of online voices looking to disrupt the conversation on race and wealth in America.

These voices are leveraging anger over a racial wealth gap that has persisted over the decades. Average white wealth is seven times that of average black wealth -- a gap that hasn't narrowed since 1962, according to a 2019 study by economists Dionissi Aliprantis and Daniel R. Carroll.

These disruptors are creating conversations online using the hashtag #ADOS -- ADOS stands for "American Descendants of Slavery" -- a movement which some critics fear could drive a wedge between voters in the black community just months ahead of the 2020 election.

The movement, which has gained traction on social media in recent months, has attracted the attention of some academics like Cornel West and politicians like Williamson, who spoke at an event for the group in the fall, though many are loathe to associate themselves with it -- either for or against.

ADOS advocates are adding a whole new layer to the conversation on reparations and economic justice by advocating only for black descendants of slaves and not the black community as a whole.

Their advocacy leaves an entire group of people, American-born descendants of immigrants, some of whose families have been in the U.S. for generations -- many whose families may have survived decades if not centuries of institutional racism -- in limbo in the conversation. And the focus has pitted ADOS adherents against people like journalist Roland Martin, who is descended from Haitian immigrants. It also appears not to address the American descendants of slaves from other countries, including for example Haiti, and whether they should be entitled to reparations.

Disparities exist between the two populations. A 2015 Pew Research report showed that U.S.-born black people were less likely to have a bachelor's degree than black immigrants -- 19% versus 26%.

The same report also showed that foreign-born black people have a $10,000 higher median income than U.S.-born -- at $33,500.

There are myriad theories and studies on why these gaps exist but the fact that many black immigrants are outpacing black Americans economically and educationally, compounded with the vast racial wealth gap between black and white America, adds fuel to the ADOS movement.

ADOS' singular focus on black descendants of slavery, and its supporters often combative approach, has sparked controversy and comparisons to a long line of nativist thinking that has gained traction from time to time throughout U.S. history.

There are also concerns from some critical of ADOS that the hashtag is linked to posts spreading disinformation and political division ahead of the presidential election. However, ABC News found no concrete evidence that the ADOS movement is part of the disinformation campaigns that plagued the 2016 election.

Pushback

Critics, many of them other black people, have accused ADOS advocates of spewing hateful, xenophobic rhetoric and of online harassment. High-profile black politicians, influencers and journalists, including Kamala Harris, Joy Reid, Jonathan Capehart and others, have been attacked by ADOS accounts for having non-American lineage -- Reid, for instance, has immigrant parents -- or because they have questioned the authenticity of ADOS social media profiles, accusing them of being trolls.

Some have even accused ADOS Twitter accounts of deliberately pushing a far-right narrative under the guise of reparations support.

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance, referred to Twitter accounts using "#ADOS" as trolls and posted that they "are a mix of [African American] proTrump racists [and] nuts."

Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore are the two most-followed ADOS activists on social media. They have both engaged in heated and controversial exchanges on Twitter and what some might call targeted harassment.

Kamala Harris, the former presidential candidate, is of Indian and Jamaican descent. Carnell has tweeted that she has issues surrounding Harris' solidarity with black people descended from slaves.

When Harris dropped out of the race on Dec. 3, Carnell and other ADOS accounts expressed their satisfaction moments after Harris' team made the announcement.

Rapper and activist Talib Kweli is an outspoken ADOS critic. While he is also an activist for black economic empowerment and is pro-reparations, he disagrees with ADOS' rhetoric.

"I don't think [Carnell and Moore] are being disingenuous about wanting reparations. What I think they are being disingenuous about is the fact that they are clearly anti-black immigrant ... and aligning with the GOP on immigration."

Kweli said he is also bothered by Carnell's association with Progressives for Immigration Reform. PFIR is a group with its own critics and has been linked to anti-immigration advocates, some of whom have been accused of xenophobia -- accusations that Kevin Lynn, PFIR's executive director calls "unfounded." Lynn did confirm to ABC News that Carnell was a PFIR board member until 2019.

Carnell denies his accusations.

"I voted for Clinton," she told ABC News. "I voted for Obama, 2008. The idea that somehow I changed my psyche, became an ultra-conservative figure doesn't make sense."

Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr., Ph.D, is an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University. He has written about the issue of reparations and the sources of racial inequality. Tillery began to take notice of ADOS' web activism over the last two years or so, he said.

While Tillery said that ADOS is not really advocating any new ideas, "they've attracted pushback because they have the radical thesis that if there's going to be reparations for slavery, that it should really only be targeted to persons who are the descendants or legacies of actual American slaves," said Tillery.

"The reason that we're having this debate around ADOS ... is because I think this notion that we have as black people is that skin color is tantamount to unity and belonging," he said.

Darity agrees. "Black American descendants of slavery have a distinctive ethnic identity because of our distinctive origins in the community that was enslaved in the United States," he said. That distinctive identity, he said, is a central premise of ADOS.

Despite the controversy, conversations involving ADOS are happening frequently online. A social listening tool by Brand24, shows that in one recent week, there were over 25,000 conversations across social media including the term "ADOS" with an engagement reach of over 56,000. In addition, Moore said that 2,000 people showed up to attend the ADOS event that he put together with Carnell in Kentucky this past October.

Carnell and Moore said the event was funded by "small donations" from ADOS adherents, help from a local black church, a historically black college, as well as their own funds. It did not have sponsorship, Moore said.

One attendee, Rashaun Phillip Sourles, 36, describes himself as an "ADOS mobilizer."

Sourles is a full-time Uber driver in the Bay Area. He told ABC News he has been struggling financially, and even found himself homeless after a foreclosure on his home. He said the ADOS message of black economic empowerment really resonated with him as he works to upright himself economically and that he will never forget the first time he watched Carnell on YouTube.

"I had been homeless more than a year living 100% out of the same Uber SUV," he said. "I was driving millionaires and billionaires around the Bay Area all day and night."

He said that Carnell "forced a brutally honest reality check about my own Bay Area black life."

"For God's sakes, I'm ... an educated man with an impeccable CV, and yet here I am, sleeping in the back of an Uber SUV somebody else owns," he said.

ADOS' insertion in the 2020 elections

ADOS is also intent on sending a controversial message during the 2020 elections, which it pushed during the October conference -- proposing a strategy of voting down-ballot Democrat unless the Democratic nominee advances what Moore calls a "black agenda" -- a tactic that at least one Pew Research study suggests helped affect the outcome in 2016, and the election of Republican President Donald Trump.

And it's a move that runs counter to Democrat-led efforts to protect voters' rights, particularly of historically disenfranchised groups like Black Americans. House Democrats recently passed legislation that would shore up voting rights and reduce gerrymandering. The bill is not expected to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

In addition to reparations, ADOS proponents want one "designation on the Census with ADOS and another for Black immigrants" and "ADOS hiring and employment data" to be gathered "for all businesses receiving tax credits, incentives, and governmental support," along with other demands, according to the website ADOS101.com run by Carnell and Moore.

ADOS is of course, not the first to address reparations or black economic empowerment. For 30 years, the late Detroit Congressman John Conyers repeatedly introduced the HR 40 bill for lawmakers to set up a commission to study the issue of reparations. The legislation has yet to pass, and the mantle for getting reparation law passed has been picked up by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who dropped out of the Democratic primary race this month.

Moore and other ADOS advocates have refused to support these bills because they say the proposals aren't enough. "It is being used as cover to avoid a discussion of real reparations for ADOS," Moore told ABC News and offers "no commitment to funding," he added.

Determining who is entitled to what

Moore also insists that ADOS' vision of a black economic agenda will benefit all black people, not just ADOS.

"Many of the black agenda items will benefit black people that aren't ADOS; [those] at [historically black colleges and universities] or living in black communities. But still, as to reparations, we use the criteria ... you must suffer both the cost of slavery and Jim Crow through your black lineage to receive reparations," he said.

He said it would be "relatively easy" to determine who is ADOS and who isn't. "Few if any voluntary black immigrants outside of students were in the United States prior to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965," he said. Reparations would "exclude black immigrant populations that voluntarily migrated to America."

Ultimately, the question of who is entitled to what and the issue of "black American politics of unity," and some of the issues ADOS is highlighting, are ones that black people will have to ask themselves, said Tillery.

These are in fact, issues that all Americans will need to think about as talk of reparations and narrowing the racial wealth gap become even more mainstream in American political conversation and into the 2020 elections.

Editor's note: Updated to clarify ADOS' proposed voting strategy.

Reparations and the lingering racial wealth gap have been conversations largely within the black American community. Both issues have received wider attention of late, particularly among the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates.

All the Democratic presidential candidates, except for former Vice President Joe Biden, said they support legislation to at least study the issue of reparations. Only Marianne Williamson, who recently ended her presidential campaign, said she fully supports reparations, in the amount of $200 billion to $500 billion. Biden has not endorsed any reparations legislation.

And reparations and black economics have been addressed at some of the recent Democratic debates.

"I didn't anticipate that, today, we would be having the most active national conversation about reparations since the Reconstruction Era," said William A. "Sandy" Darity, Jr., Ph.D., an economist and professor of public policy at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.

The national spotlight on economic injustice is also giving rise to a new wave of online voices looking to disrupt the conversation on race and wealth in America.

These voices are leveraging anger over a racial wealth gap that has persisted over the decades. Average white wealth is seven times that of average black wealth -- a gap that hasn't narrowed since 1962, according to a 2019 study by economists Dionissi Aliprantis and Daniel R. Carroll.

These disruptors are creating conversations online using the hashtag #ADOS -- ADOS stands for "American Descendants of Slavery" -- a movement which some critics fear could drive a wedge between voters in the black community just months ahead of the 2020 election.

The movement, which has gained traction on social media in recent months, has attracted the attention of some academics like Cornel West and politicians like Williamson, who spoke at an event for the group in the fall, though many are loathe to associate themselves with it -- either for or against.

ADOS advocates are adding a whole new layer to the conversation on reparations and economic justice by advocating only for black descendants of slaves and not the black community as a whole.

Their advocacy leaves an entire group of people, American-born descendants of immigrants, some of whose families have been in the U.S. for generations -- many whose families may have survived decades if not centuries of institutional racism -- in limbo in the conversation. And the focus has pitted ADOS adherents against people like journalist Roland Martin, who is descended from Haitian immigrants. It also appears not to address the American descendants of slaves from other countries, including for example Haiti, and whether they should be entitled to reparations.

Disparities exist between the two populations. A 2015 Pew Research report showed that U.S.-born black people were less likely to have a bachelor's degree than black immigrants -- 19% versus 26%.

The same report also showed that foreign-born black people have a $10,000 higher median income than U.S.-born -- at $33,500.

There are myriad theories and studies on why these gaps exist but the fact that many black immigrants are outpacing black Americans economically and educationally, compounded with the vast racial wealth gap between black and white America, adds fuel to the ADOS movement.

ADOS' singular focus on black descendants of slavery, and its supporters often combative approach, has sparked controversy and comparisons to a long line of nativist thinking that has gained traction from time to time throughout U.S. history.

There are also concerns from some critical of ADOS that the hashtag is linked to posts spreading disinformation and political division ahead of the presidential election. However, ABC News found no concrete evidence that the ADOS movement is part of the disinformation campaigns that plagued the 2016 election.

Pushback

Critics, many of them other black people, have accused ADOS advocates of spewing hateful, xenophobic rhetoric and of online harassment. High-profile black politicians, influencers and journalists, including Kamala Harris, Joy Reid, Jonathan Capehart and others, have been attacked by ADOS accounts for having non-American lineage -- Reid, for instance, has immigrant parents -- or because they have questioned the authenticity of ADOS social media profiles, accusing them of being trolls.

Some have even accused ADOS Twitter accounts of deliberately pushing a far-right narrative under the guise of reparations support.

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance, referred to Twitter accounts using "#ADOS" as trolls and posted that they "are a mix of [African American] proTrump racists [and] nuts."

Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore are the two most-followed ADOS activists on social media. They have both engaged in heated and controversial exchanges on Twitter and what some might call targeted harassment.

Kamala Harris, the former presidential candidate, is of Indian and Jamaican descent. Carnell has tweeted that she has issues surrounding Harris' solidarity with black people descended from slaves.

When Harris dropped out of the race on Dec. 3, Carnell and other ADOS accounts expressed their satisfaction moments after Harris' team made the announcement.

Rapper and activist Talib Kweli is an outspoken ADOS critic. While he is also an activist for black economic empowerment and is pro-reparations, he disagrees with ADOS' rhetoric.

"I don't think [Carnell and Moore] are being disingenuous about wanting reparations. What I think they are being disingenuous about is the fact that they are clearly anti-black immigrant ... and aligning with the GOP on immigration."

Kweli said he is also bothered by Carnell's association with Progressives for Immigration Reform. PFIR is a group with its own critics and has been linked to anti-immigration advocates, some of whom have been accused of xenophobia -- accusations that Kevin Lynn, PFIR's executive director calls "unfounded." Lynn did confirm to ABC News that Carnell was a PFIR board member until 2019.

Carnell denies his accusations.

"I voted for Clinton," she told ABC News. "I voted for Obama, 2008. The idea that somehow I changed my psyche, became an ultra-conservative figure doesn't make sense."

Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr., Ph.D, is an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University. He has written about the issue of reparations and the sources of racial inequality. Tillery began to take notice of ADOS' web activism over the last two years or so, he said.

While Tillery said that ADOS is not really advocating any new ideas, "they've attracted pushback because they have the radical thesis that if there's going to be reparations for slavery, that it should really only be targeted to persons who are the descendants or legacies of actual American slaves," said Tillery.

"The reason that we're having this debate around ADOS ... is because I think this notion that we have as black people is that skin color is tantamount to unity and belonging," he said.

Darity agrees. "Black American descendants of slavery have a distinctive ethnic identity because of our distinctive origins in the community that was enslaved in the United States," he said. That distinctive identity, he said, is a central premise of ADOS.

Despite the controversy, conversations involving ADOS are happening frequently online. A social listening tool by Brand24, shows that in one recent week, there were over 25,000 conversations across social media including the term "ADOS" with an engagement reach of over 56,000. In addition, Moore said that 2,000 people showed up to attend the ADOS event that he put together with Carnell in Kentucky this past October.

Carnell and Moore said the event was funded by "small donations" from ADOS adherents, help from a local black church, a historically black college, as well as their own funds. It did not have sponsorship, Moore said.

One attendee, Rashaun Phillip Sourles, 36, describes himself as an "ADOS mobilizer."

Sourles is a full-time Uber driver in the Bay Area. He told ABC News he has been struggling financially, and even found himself homeless after a foreclosure on his home. He said the ADOS message of black economic empowerment really resonated with him as he works to upright himself economically and that he will never forget the first time he watched Carnell on YouTube.

"I had been homeless more than a year living 100% out of the same Uber SUV," he said. "I was driving millionaires and billionaires around the Bay Area all day and night."

He said that Carnell "forced a brutally honest reality check about my own Bay Area black life."

"For God's sakes, I'm ... an educated man with an impeccable CV, and yet here I am, sleeping in the back of an Uber SUV somebody else owns," he said.

ADOS' insertion in the 2020 elections

ADOS is also intent on sending a controversial message during the 2020 elections, which it pushed during the October conference -- proposing a strategy of voting down-ballot Democrat unless the Democratic nominee advances what Moore calls a "black agenda" -- a tactic that at least one Pew Research study suggests helped affect the outcome in 2016, and the election of Republican President Donald Trump.

And it's a move that runs counter to Democrat-led efforts to protect voters' rights, particularly of historically disenfranchised groups like Black Americans. House Democrats recently passed legislation that would shore up voting rights and reduce gerrymandering. The bill is not expected to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

In addition to reparations, ADOS proponents want one "designation on the Census with ADOS and another for Black immigrants" and "ADOS hiring and employment data" to be gathered "for all businesses receiving tax credits, incentives, and governmental support," along with other demands, according to the website ADOS101.com run by Carnell and Moore.

ADOS is of course, not the first to address reparations or black economic empowerment. For 30 years, the late Detroit Congressman John Conyers repeatedly introduced the HR 40 bill for lawmakers to set up a commission to study the issue of reparations. The legislation has yet to pass, and the mantle for getting reparation law passed has been picked up by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who dropped out of the Democratic primary race this month.

Moore and other ADOS advocates have refused to support these bills because they say the proposals aren't enough. "It is being used as cover to avoid a discussion of real reparations for ADOS," Moore told ABC News and offers "no commitment to funding," he added.

Determining who is entitled to what

Moore also insists that ADOS' vision of a black economic agenda will benefit all black people, not just ADOS.

"Many of the black agenda items will benefit black people that aren't ADOS; [those] at [historically black colleges and universities] or living in black communities. But still, as to reparations, we use the criteria ... you must suffer both the cost of slavery and Jim Crow through your black lineage to receive reparations," he said.

He said it would be "relatively easy" to determine who is ADOS and who isn't. "Few if any voluntary black immigrants outside of students were in the United States prior to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965," he said. Reparations would "exclude black immigrant populations that voluntarily migrated to America."

Ultimately, the question of who is entitled to what and the issue of "black American politics of unity," and some of the issues ADOS is highlighting, are ones that black people will have to ask themselves, said Tillery.

These are in fact, issues that all Americans will need to think about as talk of reparations and narrowing the racial wealth gap become even more mainstream in American political conversation and into the 2020 elections.

Editor's note: Updated to clarify ADOS' proposed voting strategy.

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Controversial group ADOS divides black Americans in fight for economic equality

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American Descendants of Slavery advocates are stirring debate and anger online. Reparations and the lingering racial wealth gap have been conversations largely within the black American community. Both issues have received wider attention of late, particularly among the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates.

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the united states constitution guarantees less rights than most other countries.

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Americans like to celebrate their Constitution, their country's foundational document, which enshrines certain inalienable rights. But it turns out these days the US Constitution is less distinctive for what equal rights it does uphold, and more for which ones it fails to.

In a study published today by UCLA, researchers compared the constitutions of 193 UN member states to assess which protect equal rights for its citizens irrespective of their differences, including gender, sexual orientation, income, and disability.

"There is no opportunity for equality if people don't have equal legal rights," Jody Heymann, a UCLA School of Public Health professor who led the research, told Quartz. The fact that a right might be provided in a country's constitution doesn't guarantee that it is granted to its citizens, of course, yet it does create an important legal precedent.

The comparison between global constitutions revealed encouraging progress in the past two decades. All of the constitutions passed since 2000 include provisions for gender rights, as well as a right to health care.

On the other hand, many older constitutions fall short. As a result, there is a disparity of constitutional guarantees for the citizens of countries with more recent constitutions and those who live in countries with older constitutional histories.

The United States stands out in this disparity: Compared to its global peers, the United States fails to guarantee all kinds of rights.

The US constitution is one of just 28 worldwide, for example, that doesn't guarantee gender equality. While Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, guaranteeing gender equality, some states have been slow to approve it, delaying its adoption as a new amendment to the Constitution. The US Constitution also doesn't protect the right to health care, unlike 142 other global constitutions. Some 160 constitutions worldwide guarantee a right to education, but the United States does not. Similarly, equal rights for people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community are not protected by the US Constitution. Landmark court decisions have outlawed discrimination of those groups, but they are still at risk of possible reversal and debate, as seen in the recent Supreme Court case debating whether sexual orientation can be grounds for firing.

Aleta Sprague, a legal analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center, a nonprofit, said that constitutional rights are engrained in the fabric of a nation, and are often quoted in the context of policy and lawmaking debate. A constitution also endures longer than other pieces of legislation. So while some groups might be protected by various laws, they are rarely as powerful as a constitutional guarantee.

Even in the cases where rights aren't immediately translated into legislation, Heymann says, their presence in the constitution tends to lead to positive results in the achievement of such rights. As an example, she mentions the right to health in the United States. Although it is not guaranteed in the US Constitution, it is included in some state constitutions. These states, Heymann says, have reduced infant mortality by a staggering 8%.

"The constitution is a powerful tool to change norms and introduce change," Amy Raub, a policy analyst at WORLD, told Quartz. She cites South Africa. The South African constitution was the first in the world to protect equality regardless of sexual orientation. Raub says that shifted the public perception of LGBTQ people.

And even though such social change can take time, after South Africa adopted its new constitutional, the country moved quickly to legalized same-sex marriage, include LGBTQ people in military service, and ban conversion therapy. Another example is Mexico: A 2015 high court decision declared a ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, as the constitution forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation.

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Most of the world's constitutions guarantee more rights than America's

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Americans like to celebrate their Constitution, their country's foundational document, which enshrines certain inalienable rights. But it turns out these days the US Constitution is less distinctive for what equal rights it does uphold, and more for which ones it fails to.

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according to the constitution Americans have the rights to bear arms as its granted by the 2nd amendment

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ALPENA, Mich. - Extra chairs had to brought into the Howard Male Conference Room at Alpena's County Annex Building for Tuesday's county commission meeting. Gun rights advocates arrived to show their support in turning Alpena into a 2nd amendment sanctuary county.

Independent journalist, Bobby Powell was there to present the resolution. He's the publisher of "The Truth is Viral," which has over 11,000 followers on Facebook and over 40,000 subscribers on YouTube. He says the constitution is clear when stating citizens have the right to bear arms, and the Michigan constitution even more so. "The Michigan constitution is even more clear," he said. "It says every person shall be allowed the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state. It's one sentence and it's very plainly clear."

During his time at the podium, Powell expressed to commissioners that their re-election could depend on how they vote on this resolution. Commissioner Brenda Fournier asked him if she were to vote no, then would that mean they wouldn't vote for her. Powell responded, "Absolutely." This was followed by cheers and clapping from some of those attending.

The commission was unable to come to a conclusion on the resolution and it was tabled until next month. Powell said that was fine by him. "They wanted to take a month to think about it, which is absolutely fine with me. This is a serious issue. It's something that should be given serious consideration. I don't want anybody to make a law or resolution or anything like that based on a snap judgement."

The next regular Alpena county commission meeting is on Feb. 25.

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Gun rights advocates push for Alpena County to become a 2nd Amendment sanctuary - WBKB11

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ALPENA, Mich. - Extra chairs had to brought into the Howard Male Conference Room at Alpena's County Annex Building for Tuesday's county commission meeting. Gun rights advocates arrived to show their support in turning Alpena into a 2nd amendment sanctuary county. Independent journalist, Bobby Powell was there to present the resolution.

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ERA bans all discrimination against sex and allows for equal rights. Virginia is now the 38th state too ratify the equal rights amendment.

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Virginia has officially become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its General Assembly took the final procedural steps Monday to sign off on the measure, with women presiding over both chambers.

The move comes 12 days after the state Senate and House of Delegates made history by backing the women's rights measure. The amendment's passage in Virginia crosses the threshold necessary for it to be included in the U.S. Constitution, though legal experts are divided on if the ERA can still move forward.

The ERA would ban discrimination on the basis of sex and guarantee equality for women under the Constitution.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) praised the action, tweeting "Today marks a new ERA for the women of this country and this Commonwealth - finally, equality for women under the United States Constitution."

The vote comes decades after Congress sent the ERA to the states in 1972, passing it with bipartisan support.

But there are big legal questions as to whether the amendment will be enshrined into the Constitution.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a concluding that because the 1982 deadline for ratification has expired, it is too late for states to ratify the ERA. The department said the only option for supporters now is to kick off the ratification process all over again in Congress.

The National Archives, which certifies the ratification of constitutional amendments, said it would abide by that opinion, unless otherwise directed by a final court order.

CNN reports there are efforts in Congress to restart the ratification process and get rid of the deadline. The House will vote on Feb. 10 on whether to rescind the deadline.

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Virginia finalizes its passage of the Equal Rights Amendment

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Virginia has officially become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its General Assembly took the final procedural steps Monday to sign off on the measure, with women presiding over both chambers. The move comes 12 days after the state Senate and House of Delegates made history by backing the women's rights measure.

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US passes bill for tibet rights https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/01/29/House-passes-bill-in-support-of-Tibet-human-rights/2821580277551/

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people are more dissatisfied with democracy then the rest of history

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The world is unhappier with democracy than ever, new research has claimed.

In a report published Wednesday, researchers from Cambridge University analyzed the political sentiment of more than 4 million people, using data from survey projects that covered 154 countries between 1995 and 2020.

The proportion of people who said they were dissatisfied with democracy over the last year hit 57.5%, according to the report, with researchers saying 2019 marked "the highest level of democratic discontent" on record.

Authors noted that over the last 25 years, the number of individuals dissatisfied with democratic politics around the world rose from a third to more than half.

Shifts in satisfaction levels were often a response to "objective circumstances and events" such as economic shocks and corruption scandals, the report said.

Following the financial crisis in 2008, for example, global dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy jumped by around 6.5%.

Many large democracies, including the U.S., Australia, U.K. and Brazil, were now at their highest-ever level of dissatisfaction with democracy.

According to the report, the U.S. in particular had seen a "dramatic and unexpected" decline in satisfaction with democracy.

When the surveys began in 1995, more than 75% of U.S. citizens were satisfied with American democracy. The first big knock came with the financial crisis, the report showed, and satisfaction has continued to deteriorate year-on-year ever since.

Fewer than 50% of Americans are now content with democracy in their country, marking the first time on record that a majority of U.S. citizens were dissatisfied with their system of government.

"Such levels of democratic dissatisfaction would not be unusual elsewhere," the report said. "But for the United States, it marks an 'end of exceptionalism' - a profound shift in America's view of itself, and therefore, of its place in the world."

However, researchers noted that they had found an "island of contentment" in Europe, where satisfaction with democracy had reached all-time highs. Denmark, Switzerland and Norway were among the countries that fell into that category.

Southeast Asia was also described as a regional "bright spot."

Latin American precedent

Speaking to CNBC in a phone call on Monday, Roberto Foa, lead author of the report, said there were a number of different factors behind the declining approval of democracy.

"In developed democracies, it's partly about political polarization - this has been gradual in the U.S. but has spiked in the last couple of years in the U.K.," he said. "Malaise with democracy in the West is often down to longer term economic stagnation and loss of geopolitical influence."

He noted there was a reasonable amount of research suggesting a rise in unhappiness with democracy tended to provoke changes in political behavior. For example, people would become more likely to vote for populist parties or politicians promising to "shake up the system."

"We expect a great deal more of this," Foa told CNBC. "The region that proves this is Latin America - the levels of dissatisfaction have always been very high and we're seeing (a rise in populist support) there."

He added that the rest of history could "look more like the south of the Americas than the north" if global satisfaction levels continued to decline.

Cambridge University's study follows a report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit last week, which found that the U.S. had a "flawed democracy" and the strength of global democracy was at its lowest since 2006.

Meanwhile, research from Edelman last week found that 70% of people around the world believed democracy was "losing its effectiveness as a form of government."

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Global dissatisfaction with democracy has reached a record high, research claims

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The world is unhappier with democracy than ever, new research has claimed. In a report published Wednesday, researchers from Cambridge University analyzed the political sentiment of more than 4 million people, using data from survey projects that covered 154 countries between 1995 and 2020.

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Florida offers women, minorities, veterans and LGBT entrepreneurs a spot to advertise their businesses on the super bowl.

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TAMPA - Next year's Super Bowl likely will bring several million dollars worth of contracts to Tampa Bay area businesses, and some of those companies have a path to improve their chances to win some game-related work.

But to take that path they need to act in the next two weeks.

The NFL runs a program called Business Connect through the local host committee to find and screen companies owned by women, minorities, veterans and LGBT entrepreneurs to provide goods or services needed by Super Bowl contractors.

The opportunities fall into nearly three dozen categories, ranging from catering, entertainment and floral services to providing portable toilets, security and waste removal to photography and printing.

So far at least 424 companies from Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties have applied, but Tampa Bay Super Bowl LV Host Committee Business Connect director LaKendria Robinson would like to get more in the mix before the Feb. 14 application deadline.

After that, the host committee will spend about a month screening applicants to create a pool of about 300 companies NFL contractors can use.

"We don't guarantee that the 300 businesses will get a contract," she said. "Once we choose the 300 businesses or vendors, we will create a Business Connect resource guide that lists all of the businesses, their specialties and what their capacity is. The contractors can refer to that guide to select their vendor or they can contact to us directly and say, 'Hey, give me your top five caterers that can serve a 1,500-person plated dinner.' "

The league emphasizes the importance of the Business Connect initiative through clear, consistent and repeated messaging, so Robinson thinks contractors recognize participation as a way to maintain a good relationship with the NFL.

This is not a new program.

When Tampa hosted the game in 2001, 105 local businesses owned by women and minorities won $2.5 million in Super Bowl-related contracts. In 2009, the initiative returned as the Emerging Business program and helped steer $3.96 million in game-related business to more than 130 bay area companies.

"It could have a significant impact on their small businesses," said A.J. Dadetto, president of the Tampa chapter of the National Association of Catering & Events. After hearing about the program, he invited Robinson to a meeting of his chapter last month.

"I have a lot of women, minority and gay and lesbian members, so it was a fit - not for everyone - but it fit a lot of them," he said. Before hearing from Robinson, "there was a lot of things they didn't know. Now they're willing to go the extra mile and apply."

Michelle Palisi, who has four employees at Chocolates by Michelle in New Port Richey, showed up for the event with a sample of what she can bring to the party: round white chocolate candies topped with an edible Super Bowl host committee logo.

"Anything with a logo," said Palisi, who said she has qualified to be a vendor for past Tampa Super Bowls. "Any shape. Any size."

To be eligible for Business Connect, companies must be certified as having at least 51 percent minority, women, veterans or LGBT ownership. The certifications must come from city, county or state agencies that qualify companies to participate in women- and minority-owned business programs, or from the Tampa Bay Small Business Development Center, the Florida State Minority Supplier Development Council or the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce.

Companies also must have a physical office, be the direct source of the goods or services they're selling and must have been in business in Hillsborough, Pinellas or Pasco counties since January 2017.

An application deadline 51 weeks before the game might seem soon, but Robinson said the schedule is driven by when the contractors will need to start issuing requests for proposals and seeking bids.

"We've gotten quite a few applications, but the lift is so heavy that we need more catering and security," she said. Other categories in demand: furniture, fencing, decorations, contract labor, golf cart rental, janitorial services and waste removal.

As part of the program, Business Connect will offer networking and business development programs to help vendors prepare for the Super Bowl bidding process as well as a series of workshops focused on strategies to help new businesses enhance and manage their growth.

"It's one thing to invite businesses to participate," said Robinson, who before joining the host committee created the minority business accelerator program for the Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce (then the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce). "It's something totally different to make sure they're prepared for those types of opportunities and those types of conversations."

After the 2009 Super Bowl, the owner of a 12-employee security firm told the Tampa Tribune he was thrilled to get two game-related contracts totaling $65,000, but was less happy when his costs to provide the services added up to $75,000.

"Obviously, this is one of the biggest games in the world, so the stakes are much higher and the expectations are much higher," Robinson said. "Making sure that our local businesses are prepared and set up for success is something that we will work on during that March to February timeline."

Longtime Tampa party planner Cindy Dervech has worked with past Super Bowls providing "all kinds of things" - bands, interactive performers, parties with beach themes - and always listens closely to what organizers say about using local businesses.

"This year, they seem like they're being very transparent," she said. "If they do what they say they're going to do, it'll be kudos to them."

To learn more and apply

Go to tampabaylv.com/businessconnect/

What they're looking for

Audio visual

Concrete barricades

Cable wire contractors

Carpet/flooring

Catering

Contract labor

Decorations

Entertainment

Heavy equipment rental

Event production

Fencing

Field turf

Florists

Furniture

General contractors

Generators

Golf carts

Graphics

Hardware supplies

Janitorial services

Office supplies

Photography/video

Portable toilets

Printing

Scaffolding

Security

Hospitality staffing

Staging

Temporary housing

Tents

Trailers

Transportation

Waste removal

White-glove service

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Tampa's fifth Super Bowl offers small businesses a get-in-the-game opportunity

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TAMPA - Next year's Super Bowl likely will bring several million dollars worth of contracts to Tampa Bay area businesses, and some of those companies have a path to improve their chances to win some game-related work. But to take that path they need to act in the next two weeks.

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https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/480400-us-government-basically-declares-war-on-millions-of-school-children

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America's democracy is at an all time low and keeps going.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/confidence-democracy-lowest-point-record/605686/

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Many are worried about the democracy in the US and should do more to protect it.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/opinions/global-democracy-decline-us-sedaca/index.html

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Confidence in Democracy Is at the Lowest Point on Record

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/confidence-democracy-lowest-point-record/605686/

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Trump threatens the rights of immigrants by sending them back to dangerous places in Mexico.

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© 2019 Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald via AP

(Washington, DC) - The United States government's year-old program requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard puts families at serious risk of harm and undermines due process protections, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing a " question and answer " analysis.

On January 29, 2019, US officials began returns of non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexican border towns for their claims to be adjudicated in US immigration courts under the " Migrant Protection Protocols," also known as "Remain in Mexico."

"For a year the Trump administration's 'Remain in Mexico' program has deprived asylum seekers of basic due process rights and endangered them in Mexican border cities," said Thomas Rachko, Jr., acting US advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch. "This program is the cornerstone of the administration's efforts to eviscerate the right to seek asylum in the United States, and its consequences have been appalling."

As of December 2019, over 59,000 asylum seekers, including 16,000 children ( about 500 of whom were under 12 months old), have been sent back to wait in Mexico. The advocacy group Human Rights First has tallied more than 816 cases of kidnapping, rape, torture, assault, and other attacks on asylum seekers in the program, including instances documented by Human Rights Watch.

Asylum seekers in Migrant Protection Protocols face significant barriers to seeking asylum, including a lack of access to counsel and barriers to legal representation. According to government data, only 4 percent of asylum seekers in the program succeed in being represented by an attorney. Less than 1 percent have been granted protection in the United States.

"The US Congress should immediately end the 'Remain in Mexico' program," Rachko said. "The US government needs to pass legislation that respects the human dignity of asylum seekers and ensures that they receive fair and timely decisions on their claims free from harm in Mexico."

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US: Returns to Mexico Threaten Rights, Security

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(Washington, DC, January 29, 2020) - The United States government's year-old program requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard puts families at serious risk of harm and undermines due process protections, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing a "question and answer" analysis.

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PEN America released a five-point guide for writers and journalists after Iranians and Iranian-Americans reported increased scrutiny at US border crossings following the killing of Qasem Soleimani.

John Ghazvinian is an Iranian-American journalist and historian, and the interim director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. On January 5, two days after the assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in Iran, Ghazvinian reported a new level of scrutiny when he landed in New York after a trip abroad.

"Well, just landed at JFK and - no surprise - got taken to the special side room and got asked (among other things) how I feel about the situation with Iran," he tweeted. "I wanted to be like: my book comes out in September, preorder now on amazon." His book happens to be titled America and Iran: A Passionate Embrace, from 1720 to the Present.

Ghazvinian's story is not an isolated case. According to 60 other Iranians and Iranian-Americans have been stopped at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine, Washington and subjected to intense scrutiny in the days following the assassination of reports, about Soleimani. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil liberties and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC, authorities confiscated passports of individuals hailing from Iran and questioned them about their political views and allegiances. The nonprofit adds that many more Iranians were refused entry due to lack of detention capacity by Customs and Border Patrol.

In a statement released on January 8, PEN America said that it's "[D]eeply concerned about the steady increase in the number of journalists and writers who have been subjected to extra scrutiny at U.S. borders in recent years." It added, "We also worry about government agents monitoring social media and using people's criticism of the government as grounds to deny entry, an act that smacks of unconstitutional ideological exclusion from the country."

But PEN America is not stopping at mere condemnations. The organization released a five-point guide to writers, journalists, and others on how to protect their rights while facing increased scrutiny at US border crossings.

The guide presents a number of useful tips for travelers, including information on what federal agents are allowed to do in different jurisdictions. For example, the guide warns that Customs and Border Protection agents are allowed to conduct warrantless searches of devices within 100 miles of the border. Officials may question you about your trip to the United States, but they cannot hold you for an extended time without cause. And if you attempt to video or audio record a federal agent questioning you in Washington, know that the state law requires the consent of all parties.

PEN America's guide is brought here in full (the organization notes that this information is not to be construed as legal advice):

1) If you are within 100 miles of the border (including coastlines), press freedom and other constitutional principles are severely limited by policies put in place by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). For example, Customs and Border Protection can conduct warrantless searches of devices at the border (or at airports). (See CBP's Policy authorizing CBP officers to "examine electronic devices" and "review and analyze the information encountered at the border...with or without individualized suspicion." See also ICE's 2009 Policy authorizing ICE agents to search electronic devices "with or without individualized suspicion."

2) For those being questioned by federal agents in Washington state, keep in mind that Washington requires consent of all parties to a video or audio recording. This means you may be violating state law if you attempt to record your interactions with border agents or other government officials without their consent.

3) Government agents may ask about your citizenship and immigration status to determine if you are a U.S. citizen, a green card holder, or have other immigration status. Officials may also ask you questions about your trip to the United States. Agents cannot hold you for an extended time without cause. You can always ask if you are free to go. If they say you are not free to go, you can assume you are under arrest and you have the right to remain silent.

4) If you are stopped, detained, or harassed by Border Patrol agents, try to get their names, their identification numbers, and any other information. This will be helpful later if you want to report the encounter. You should try to document your interaction as quickly as possible so you can report it if you want to do so later.

5) If agents seize your digital device(s) or other personal property, you have the right to demand a property receipt ( Customs Form 6051D).

In its report of the detention of Iranian and Iranian-American travelers at the Peace Arch Border Crossing, CAIR brought the story of Crystal, a 24-year-old American citizen and medical student who said she was detained and interrogated with her family for more than 10 hours. "The vast majority of people being held last night were American citizens," said Crystal. "We kept asking why we were being detained and asked questions that had nothing to do with our reason for traveling and was told 'I'm sorry this is just the wrong time for you guys.'"

Numerous journalists, writers, and artists have been affected by the Trump administration's travel ban. Earlier this month, Oscar nominated Syrian director Feras Fayyad reported that he was denied a visa to the United States, which might prevent him from attending the Academy Awards ceremony. In November of 2019, several Iraqi artists participating in the MoMA PS1 exhibition Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 1991-2011 were similarly denied entry to the States. According to one of the exhibition's curators, Ruba Katrib, other artists gave up in advance on attending the opening reception, knowing that their visa requests would be denied.

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How to Protect Your Rights at US Border Crossings

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PEN America released a five-point guide for writers and journalists after Iranians and Iranian-Americans reported increased scrutiny at US border crossings following the killing of Qasem Soleimani. John Ghazvinian is an Iranian-American journalist and historian, and the interim director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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democracy allows people to take control of the government and have a part in the decison making process of legislation

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Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years, according to University of Cambridge researchers.

Academics have analysed what they say is the biggest global dataset on attitudes towards democracy, based on four million people in 3,500 surveys.

The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.

"Across the globe, democracy is in a state of malaise," report author Roberto Foa said.

The study, from the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Future of Democracy, has tracked views on democracy since 1995 - with the figures for 2019 showing the proportion dissatisfied rising from 48% to 58%, the highest recorded level.

Is democracy having a mid-life crisis?

Middle classes being squeezed out by the ultra-rich

Life expectancy in the US in decline

"We find that dissatisfaction with democracy has risen over time and is reaching an all-time global high, in particular in developed countries," Dr Foa said.

The research, covering 154 countries around the world, is based on asking people if they are satisfied or dissatisfied with democracy in their own country.

Data for some countries goes back to the 1970s and the long-term picture recorded a steady upwards swing of the pendulum towards more satisfaction with democracy through the last decades of the 20th Century.

This was an era of the collapse of Communist power in Eastern and Central Europe and the apparent ascendancy of Western democracy - with "global sentiment" appearing to be supportive of the rise in democracy.

But over the past decade, this appears to have shifted steadily in a more negative direction - with rising dissatisfaction.

The study suggests this could reflect political and social reverberations of the "economic shock" of the financial crash of 2008 and disquiet from the refugee crisis of 2015 and "foreign policy failures".

It warns of a loss confidence in democracy and says the rise of populism is not so much a cause but a symptom.

In the UK, the study says, from the 1970s satisfaction with democracy rose consistently for 30 years - reaching a high point in the years following the millennium.

But it has slipped downwards since 2005 - following global trends such as the financial crisis and national controversies such as MPs' expenses.

And researchers say there has been a more recent plunge in satisfaction, which could reflect the political stalemate around Brexit, in surveys carried out before December's general election:

In 1995, the proportion of those dissatisfied with democracy in the UK was 47%

In 2005, it reached its lowest point - 33%

In 2019, in surveys before the general election, it reached 61%

The US, meanwhile, has seen high levels of satisfaction - about 75% between 1995 and 2005 - followed by a "dramatic and unexpected" decline, to below 50%.

Such cynicism might not be unusual in some countries but Dr Foa said it represented a "profound shift in America's view of itself".

The study says satisfaction has deteriorated in the wake of the financial crash, with political polarisation and deepening levels of distrust.

But a group of European countries has been bucking this trend, with satisfaction with democracy higher than ever before in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands.

"If confidence in democracy has been slipping, it is because democratic institutions have been seen failing to address some of the major crises of our era, from economic crashes to the threat of global warming," said Dr Foa.

"To restore democratic legitimacy, that must change."

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Dissatisfaction with democracy 'at record high'

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Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years, according to University of Cambridge researchers. Academics have analysed what they say is the biggest global dataset on attitudes towards democracy, based on four million people in 3,500 surveys. The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.

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many childrens oppurtunity may vary in what kind of neibhorhood they are in

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In the Memphis, Tennessee, metro area, 40% of children live in some of the toughest neighborhood conditions in the country. Yet there are also pockets of prosperity, giving kids in the same area a better chance to grow up healthy and thriving - and a life expectancy that's 9.3 years longer, according to a new report.

While Memphis' case is extreme, it's far from the only metro area to see a wide neighborhood-level gap in children's ability to grow up healthy. These disparities have been playing out in communities across the U.S., according to the analysis from Brandeis University, which shows that while there's been a major opportunity divide between metro areas, those inequalities have been even more striking within metros.

"As a nation, our children face stark inequities in opportunity," the report says. "Because the foundations of adult wellbeing, health and productivity are established in childhood, improving child opportunity and narrowing inequities among children is essential for attaining a healthy adult population and future economic productivity."

The quality of a child's neighborhood has important ties to their economic mobility and health outcomes, including their life expectancy. To measure children's access to opportunity in more than 70,000 neighborhoods, researchers analyzed 29 conditions - examining things like school quality, access to healthy food and clean air - at the census tract level, assigning metro areas an index score on a 100-point scale. The most recent scores reflect a neighborhood's conditions as of 2015.

Overall, New England and Plains states tended to have more metro areas with high-opportunity neighborhoods, the analysis shows, while California's Central Valley and Texas were home to multiple neighborhoods with very low opportunity. Madison, Wisconsin, scored highest on the index, with "virtually" no children of any race living in very low-opportunity areas, according to the report.

"A child growing up in Bakersfield encounters many challenges in her neighborhood," the report says. "On the other hand, a child in Madison encounters many resources and supports."

The study also notes that the childhood "opportunity gap" is often even more extreme within metro areas, with just 9% of the variation in neighborhood-level opportunity occurring among metro areas and 91% occurring within metro areas.

"Within a given metro area, children who live only short distances apart often experience completely different worlds of neighborhood opportunity," report authors said. Kids living in a low-opportunity neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for example, may experience conditions closer to those in a very low-opportunity neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, than to those in a nearby higher-opportunity community in Bridgeport.

Racial disparities at the neighborhood level were also evident. Across the 100 largest metros, for example, white children lived in neighborhoods with an average index score of 73, compared with scores of 33 for Hispanic kids and 24 for black children, the analysis shows. In general, the white-black opportunity gap was narrower in places with smaller populations of black children.

Overall, the disparities carry serious implications. Across the 100 largest metro areas, people living in the highest-opportunity neighborhoods had a life expectancy of 82 - seven years longer than the life expectancy of 75 in in very low-opportunity neighborhoods.

Compared with white children, black children were 7.6 times as likely and Hispanic kids were 5.3 times as likely to live in communities with very low levels of opportunity, the report shows.

As the U.S. continues to diversify, "the harms of inequities in neighborhood opportunity will affect not only a growing share of the child population but all of us," the report says.

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Childhood Opportunity Varies Dramatically by Neighborhood

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In the Memphis, Tennessee, metro area, 40% of children live in some of the toughest neighborhood conditions in the country. Yet there are also pockets of prosperity, giving kids in the same area a better chance to grow up healthy and thriving - and a life expectancy that's 9.3 years longer, according to a new report.

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Learning from the upheaval of the nineteen-thirties.

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. "The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America," a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. "In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life." People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. "You are a liar!" one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. "Now, now, we don't allow that," the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson's Administration had promised that winning the Great War would "make the world safe for democracy." The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

"Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day," the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: "In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work." When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. "The liberal state is destined to perish," Mussolini predicted in 1932. "All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal." By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that "the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared." What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. "The present century is the century of authority," he declared, "a century of the Right, a Fascist century."

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. "We do not distrust the future of essential democracy," F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans' own declining faith in self-government. "What Does Democracy Mean?" NBC radio asked listeners. "Do we Negroes believe in democracy?" W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on "The Future of Democracy in the United States," predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because "there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on." Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

"It's not too late," Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in " Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," in 1939. "Great principles don't get lost once they come to light." It wasn't too late. It's still not too late.

There's a kind of likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

"American democracy," as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod's name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from "full democracy" to "authoritarian regime." In 2006, the U.S. was a "full democracy," the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a "flawed democracy," and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn't have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn't saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one's appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany "the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today," and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a "beautiful democracy," prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, "If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want." In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn't find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, "Be sure you know what you prepare to defend."

It's a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: "If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire."

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its "ruthless enemies-war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man's lust for power and woman's miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways"-unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: "If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man's or woman's, is worth the paper on which it is printed."

If the United States hasn't gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it's printed, that's because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a "new deal for the American people," his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another's voices.

This didn't happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, F.D.R.'s Works Progress Administration produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called "Americans All, Immigrants All," written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. "What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?" a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. "What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?" The finale celebrated the American experiment: "The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!"

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes's "Americans All, Immigrants All," because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected F.D.R. in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country's history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: "Is Democracy Doomed?" "Can Democracy Survive?" (Those were the past century's versions of more recent titles, such as " How Democracy Ends," " Why Liberalism Failed," " How the Right Lost Its Mind," and " How Democracies Die." The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called "Whither Democracy?," addressed "to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy-and who hasn't." It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. "Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried," the editors explained. "Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship." On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington's Constitution Hall. " Laski Tells How to Save Democracy," the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled "The Future of Democracy," at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. "I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser," he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville's " Democracy in America," an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville's heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on "The Crisis of Democracy"; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In "The Prospects for Democracy," the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: "The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander's world empire." Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It's an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation's growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that "at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today," ran a series on "The Future of Democracy," featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. "Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?" the editors asked each writer. The series' lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. "I call this kind of question 'meteorological,' " he grumbled. "It is like asking, 'Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?' " The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. "We need solely to make up our own minds and to act."

Don't ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter's husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. "The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard," said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of "Democracy and the Future," and warning against reading Beard's books-at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning "un-German" books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which "omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government." Beard's books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn't back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts-reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. "The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American 'intelligence,' " Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. "Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience," he insisted. "And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy." Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you've got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched "America's Town Meeting of the Air," an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC's Blue Network. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, "Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!" Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the U.S. have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. "We are living today on the thin edge of history," Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation, said in 1938, during a "Town Meeting of the Air" debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. "We didn't expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded," the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: "A democracy is a place where a 'Town Meeting of the Air' can take place."

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. "Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women," Dorothy Thompson once said. "The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it's 3,000 miles away and has never moved."

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city's schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that "the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely." When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about "Why I Support the New Deal," Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about "Why I Oppose the New Deal." Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines's seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites-from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. "It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States," Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered?

Do Company Unions Help Labor?

Do Machines Oust Men?

Must the West Get Out of the East?

Can We Conquer Poverty?

Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?

Is Propaganda a Menace?

Do We Need a New Constitution?

Should Women Work?

Is America a Good Neighbor?

Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don't always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a terrible hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called "Why Women Fail," and who had urged F.D.R. to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: "What is it everyone on the radio is talking about-what is this democracy-what does it mean?" Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers-two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist-tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn't agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties-but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World's Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: "The World of Tomorrow." The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn't open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time "of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos." Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World's Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers' War Board, asking him to write a statement about " The Meaning of Democracy." He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, "Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is." It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. ♦

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Learning from the upheaval of the nineteen-thirties. The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. "The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America," a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937.

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By the people for the people

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equality for LGBTQ community in the workplace

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BOSTON, Jan. 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cengage, an education and technology company, today announced that its LGBTQ practices have been recognized by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC)'s 2020 Corporate Equality Index (CEI). The Index is the nation's premier benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ workplace equality.

Cengage joins the ranks of more than 1,000 major U.S. businesses that participated in this year's Index rating. The company received a score of 90 out of 100.

"At Cengage, inclusivity is a core value to our corporate culture," said Michael E. Hansen, CEO, Cengage. "We are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and diverse environment, and it is a great honor to be acknowledged by HRC as part of the Corporate Equality Index. I am immensely proud of the efforts made by our team - driven by employee advocates - to advance this commitment."

As part of its commitment to workplace equality, Cengage advances its support for LGBTQ employees-and diversity efforts broadly-in a number of ways, including the company's Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). ERGs are voluntary, employee-led groups organized around shared experiences or affinity to help to build a positive and supportive workplace. Last May, Cengage joined the Human Rights Campaign Business Coalition for the Equality Act, a group of leading U.S. employers that support federal legislation that would provide equal protections to LGBTQ people.

"The impact of the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index over its 18-year history is profound. In this time, the corporate community has worked with us to adopt LGBTQ-inclusive policies, practices and benefits, establishing the Corporate Equality Index as a primary driving force for LGBTQ workplace inclusion in America and across the globe," said HRC President Alphonso David. "These companies know that protecting their LGBTQ employees and customers from discrimination is not just the right thing to do - it is also the best business decision. In addition, many of these leaders are also advocating for the LGBTQ community and equality under the law in the public square. From supporting LGBTQ civil rights protections in the U.S. through HRC's Business Coalition for the Equality Act, to featuring transgender and non-binary people in an ad in Argentina, to advocating for marriage equality in Taiwan -- businesses understand their LGBTQ employees and customers deserve to be seen, valued and respected not only at work, but in every aspect of daily life."

The results of this year's CEI showcase how 1059 U.S.-based companies are not only promoting LGBTQ-friendly workplace policies in the U.S., but helping advance the cause of LGBTQ inclusion in workplaces abroad.

The CEI rates companies and top law firms on detailed criteria falling under five broad categories:

Non-discrimination policies

Employment benefits

Demonstrated organizational competency and accountability around LGBTQ diversity and inclusion

Public commitment to LGBTQ equality

Responsible citizenship

The full report, is available online at www.hrc.org/cei.

About Cengage
Cengage is the education and technology company built for learners. As the largest US-based provider of teaching and learning materials for higher education, we offer valuable options at affordable price points. Our industry-leading initiatives include Cengage Unlimited, the first-of-its-kind all-access digital subscription service. We embrace innovation to create learning experiences that build confidence and momentum toward the future students want. Headquartered in Boston, Cengage also serves K-12, library and workforce training markets around the world. Visit us at www.cengage.com or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

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Human Rights Campaign Recognizes Cengage for LGBTQ Workplace Equality

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Cengage, an education and technology company, today announced that its LGBTQ practices have been recognized by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC)'s 2020 Corporate Equality Index (CEI). The Index is the nation's premier benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices

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The United States government is requiring all asylum seekers to wait the border of mexico

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© 2019 Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald via AP

(Washington, DC) - The United States government's year-old program requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard puts families at serious risk of harm and undermines due process protections, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing a " question and answer " analysis.

On January 29, 2019, US officials began returns of non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexican border towns for their claims to be adjudicated in US immigration courts under the " Migrant Protection Protocols," also known as "Remain in Mexico."

"For a year the Trump administration's 'Remain in Mexico' program has deprived asylum seekers of basic due process rights and endangered them in Mexican border cities," said Thomas Rachko, Jr., acting US advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch. "This program is the cornerstone of the administration's efforts to eviscerate the right to seek asylum in the United States, and its consequences have been appalling."

As of December 2019, over 59,000 asylum seekers, including 16,000 children ( about 500 of whom were under 12 months old), have been sent back to wait in Mexico. The advocacy group Human Rights First has tallied more than 816 cases of kidnapping, rape, torture, assault, and other attacks on asylum seekers in the program, including instances documented by Human Rights Watch.

Asylum seekers in Migrant Protection Protocols face significant barriers to seeking asylum, including a lack of access to counsel and barriers to legal representation. According to government data, only 4 percent of asylum seekers in the program succeed in being represented by an attorney. Less than 1 percent have been granted protection in the United States.

"The US Congress should immediately end the 'Remain in Mexico' program," Rachko said. "The US government needs to pass legislation that respects the human dignity of asylum seekers and ensures that they receive fair and timely decisions on their claims free from harm in Mexico."

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US: Returns to Mexico Threaten Rights, Security

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(Washington, DC, January 29, 2020) - The United States government's year-old program requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard puts families at serious risk of harm and undermines due process protections, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing a "question and answer" analysis.

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ISIS may return due to
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2020/0128/US-Iran-tensions-provide-comeback-opportunity-for-IS

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In the Memphis, Tennessee, metro area, 40% of children live in some of the toughest neighborhood conditions in the country. Yet there are also pockets of prosperity, giving kids in the same area a better chance to grow up healthy and thriving - and a life expectancy that's 9.3 years longer, according to a new report.

While Memphis' case is extreme, it's far from the only metro area to see a wide neighborhood-level gap in children's ability to grow up healthy. These disparities have been playing out in communities across the U.S., according to the analysis from Brandeis University, which shows that while there's been a major opportunity divide between metro areas, those inequalities have been even more striking within metros.

"As a nation, our children face stark inequities in opportunity," the report says. "Because the foundations of adult wellbeing, health and productivity are established in childhood, improving child opportunity and narrowing inequities among children is essential for attaining a healthy adult population and future economic productivity."

The quality of a child's neighborhood has important ties to their economic mobility and health outcomes, including their life expectancy. To measure children's access to opportunity in more than 70,000 neighborhoods, researchers analyzed 29 conditions - examining things like school quality, access to healthy food and clean air - at the census tract level, assigning metro areas an index score on a 100-point scale. The most recent scores reflect a neighborhood's conditions as of 2015.

Overall, New England and Plains states tended to have more metro areas with high-opportunity neighborhoods, the analysis shows, while California's Central Valley and Texas were home to multiple neighborhoods with very low opportunity. Madison, Wisconsin, scored highest on the index, with "virtually" no children of any race living in very low-opportunity areas, according to the report.

"A child growing up in Bakersfield encounters many challenges in her neighborhood," the report says. "On the other hand, a child in Madison encounters many resources and supports."

The study also notes that the childhood "opportunity gap" is often even more extreme within metro areas, with just 9% of the variation in neighborhood-level opportunity occurring among metro areas and 91% occurring within metro areas.

"Within a given metro area, children who live only short distances apart often experience completely different worlds of neighborhood opportunity," report authors said. Kids living in a low-opportunity neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for example, may experience conditions closer to those in a very low-opportunity neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, than to those in a nearby higher-opportunity community in Bridgeport.

Racial disparities at the neighborhood level were also evident. Across the 100 largest metros, for example, white children lived in neighborhoods with an average index score of 73, compared with scores of 33 for Hispanic kids and 24 for black children, the analysis shows. In general, the white-black opportunity gap was narrower in places with smaller populations of black children.

Overall, the disparities carry serious implications. Across the 100 largest metro areas, people living in the highest-opportunity neighborhoods had a life expectancy of 82 - seven years longer than the life expectancy of 75 in in very low-opportunity neighborhoods.

Compared with white children, black children were 7.6 times as likely and Hispanic kids were 5.3 times as likely to live in communities with very low levels of opportunity, the report shows.

As the U.S. continues to diversify, "the harms of inequities in neighborhood opportunity will affect not only a growing share of the child population but all of us," the report says.

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Childhood Opportunity Varies Dramatically by Neighborhood

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In the Memphis, Tennessee, metro area, 40% of children live in some of the toughest neighborhood conditions in the country. Yet there are also pockets of prosperity, giving kids in the same area a better chance to grow up healthy and thriving - and a life expectancy that's 9.3 years longer, according to a new report.

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The state of Florida is trying to pass a law that allows certain convicted felons to vote.

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By BOBBY CAINA CALVAN and KATE BRUMBACK

ATLANTA (AP) - Lawyers for the electoral battleground state of Florida asked a federal appeals court on Tuesday to set aside a ruling that allowed some felons to regain access to the ballot box despite owing fines and other legal debts.

Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, argue that only felons who have completed all conditions of their sentences should be allowed to vote. He and GOP lawmakers say that to regain the right to vote, felons must not only serve their time but also pay all fines and other legal financial obligations.

The case before the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could be consequential because of the razor-thin margins that sometimes decide election contests in Florida - a perennial battleground state.

"This Court's answer to that question will have far reaching effects, as it will determine whether the State must comply with the court's injunction in upcoming elections of national, state, and local significance in 2020," Florida's brief says.

At issue before the appellate court is Amendment 4, a ballot measure approved by voters in 2018, allowing felons to regain the right to vote ahead of the March 17 primaries and November's crucial presidential balloting.

In response to Amendment 4, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill - later signed by DeSantis - stipulating that felons must pay all fines, restitution and other financial obligations to complete their sentences.

Voting rights groups immediately sued and asked for a temporary injunction that would let felons continue registering to vote and cast ballots until the merits of the law can be fully adjudicated. A full trial is expected to begin in April.

In October, a federal judge in Tallahassee called Florida's voter registration process an "administrative nightmare" and suspended the law for plaintiffs who could not afford to pay their outstanding debts. He agreed with voter rights advocates that imposing the debt requirement amounted to a poll tax.

Although that ruling directly benefited only the 17 plaintiffs in the cases, the case could have broad implications for thousands of other felons.

During arguments Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit asked tough questions of both sides, many of them focusing on very technical legal issues. But they seemed skeptical of some of the state's arguments.

Senior Judge Lanier Anderson repeatedly brought up a hypothetical scenario of two people convicted of the same crimes and sentenced to the same punishment, but one can afford to pay the financial obligations and has the right to vote restored while the other can't afford to pay and remains unable to vote.

Pete Patterson, a lawyer representing the state, argued that justice would have been completed in the first case but not in the second.

One of the plaintiffs, Rosemary McCoy, traveled to Atlanta for the hearing. At a news conference afterward, she spoke passionately about regaining her right to vote.

"How long do you have to pay? We served our time. We made a mistake," she said. "It shouldn't be forever."

State officials predicted "irreparable harm" if the temporary injunction stands and disputed that the financial requirement is a poll tax.

"The criminal restitution, fines, and fees that Plaintiffs have not paid are not any type of tax on the right to vote; they are aspects of punishment for their crimes that they have not fulfilled," the state argues in its appeal.

As many as 1.6 million felons who have completed their prison sentences regained voting privileges under Amendment 4, which was passed overwhelmingly by Florida voters in November 2018.

In a brief contesting the state's appeal, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is representing some of the felons, said the legislation that stripped voting rights was "one in a long string of examples of Florida's outright hostility towards voting rights, especially when it comes to people with felony convictions."

With a stroke of the governor's pen, 80% of the state's felons reenfranchised through Amendment 4 were again ineligible to vote, according to attorneys representing the former inmates.

Earlier this month, the Florida Supreme Court issued a non-binding advisory opinion agreeing with the Republican governor.

With the Feb. 18 deadline looming to register for the presidential primary, the three-member appellate panel is expected to quickly deliver a ruling.

Calvan reported from Tallahassee, Florida.

Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Appeals Court Weighs Florida Law on Felon Voting Rights

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Lawyers for the electoral battleground state of Florida are asking a U.S. appellate court to set aside a ruling that let some impoverished felons regain access to the ballot box, despite owing fines and other legal debts.

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The US has fallen behind on equality of the sexes

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Editor's Note: Jody Heymann is founding director, Amy Raub is an economist, and Aleta Sprague is a senior legal analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center at UCLA. They are co-authors of ' Advancing Equality', being released by University of California Press on January 14. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the authors. View more opinion articles at CNN.

Eighty percent of Americans wrongly believe the US Constitution ensures that men and women have equal rights, according to one poll. It doesn't - and it's about time the US enshrines the Equal Rights Amendment in the supreme law of the land.

Women gained the constitutional right to vote in 1920 and it took nearly half a century later before laws guaranteed equality at work. While Congress passed the ERA - which establishes equality regardless of sex - in 1972, it languished for decades after it failed to reach the 38-state ratification threshold required to amend the US Constitution.

After a renewed push in recent years, activists are now looking to Virginia, where Democrats won a majority in the November 2019 elections, to become the 38th state to ratify the ERA. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel argued that the deadline to ratify the ERA has expired, and advocates, policymakers and legal experts have weighed in on its future. Amidst all of the debates about legal procedures, it's easy to lose sight of how vital the ERA is for our country-or how far the US lags behind the rest of the world in this regard.

We have released a new study that shows that the US is one of just 28 nations that has failed to provide an explicit guarantee of equal rights or non-discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. Globally, the US now lags 165 other nations with stronger constitutional protections for women.

Every constitution adopted since 2000 from Afghanistan's to Zimbabwe's-has included a gender equality guarantee. And in the full range of political and social settings, these constitutional guarantees have helped move equality a step forward, from empowering individual women to claim their rights in court in Tanzania, providing a foundation for new laws addressing gender-based violence in Nepal, or providing a tool for women demanding equal pay in Switzerland.

Why has the US Constitution fallen behind other countries in calling for the equal treatment of women and men? It is not simply because we have an old constitution. In fact, other countries with old constitutions have recognized the importance of adding gender equality provisions to reflect their commitment to equal rights.

Paradoxically, critics of the ERA have argued that the amendment would have both a major impact and no impact. On one hand, fearmongers claim that guaranteeing equal rights would hurt women by mandating the identical treatment of men and women in all circumstances. There is ample experience globally to disprove this. In many of the 165 countries that constitutionally guarantee gender equality, these provisions have been found consistent with laws and policies that allow for differential treatment to achieve greater equality in practice, by preventing gender-based violence, for example, or facilitating women's full representation in workplaces and governments.

Moreover, constitutional equality provisions have not impeded commonsense measures that treat women differently such as laws allowing new mothers to take breastfeeding breaks during the workday, which exist in the vast majority of countries.

On the other hand, critics have argued that the 14th amendment, one of three amendments adopted after the Civil War, makes the ERA redundant by stipulating that all persons have "equal protection of the law," even though it does not specifically guarantee equal treatment across sexes.

The ERA's critics are correct that the 14th amendment has enabled great strides for gender equality: as a litigator in the 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg used the Equal Protection Clause to extend legal equality on the basis of sex, including through several landmark cases striking down laws that did not give men who were caregivers or homemakers the same benefits as women. However, gender equality is still held to a lower constitutional standard than racial equality and the road to these legal victories was tortuous. The ERA would provide a more powerful foundation for enforcing gender equality in the US.

We've seen this in other countries. In Spain, for example, constitutional provisions for gender equality have been used to remove penalties for women taking maternity leave and to ensure workers in gendered occupations receive equal pay for work of equal value. In Germany, the Constitutional Court found that the gender equality provision provided the foundation for an innovative parental leave policy, which incentivizes both fathers and mothers to take leave. As these cases show, constitutional gender equality makes a difference for both men and women when it comes to economic and caregiving opportunities.

Adopting the ERA would also send a critical message about American values and have practical benefits. Constitutionally guaranteeing gender equality would allow individuals to more easily claim their rights in court. It also would guard against the potential roll-back of rights following changes in presidential administrations. For example, a stronger constitutional commitment to gender equality would offer greater protection against the recent threats to Title IX, the federal law addressing gender equality in education.

Beyond the human and societal value, constitutional gender equality can yield hundreds of billions in GDP growth. According to a 2016 study from McKinsey, closing the gender gap in the economy by 2025 would add $4.3 trillion to US' GDP. The Constitution provides a clear process to ensure that the architecture of our republic can adapt, whether it be by adding the first amendment to guarantee freedom of religion in 1791 or abolishing slavery in 1865.

It's telling that a large number of Americans believe the Constitution already protects gender equality, and there's tremendous support for the ERA; 94% of Americans, including 90% of men, are in favor of it. It's been a century since the US constitution was amended to ensure that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged on the basis of sex. It's time to finish the job and expand equal rights to include full equal protection under the law.

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The US has fallen behind on equality of the sexes | CNN

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Eighty percent of Americans wrongly believe the US Constitution ensures that men and women have equal rights, according to one poll, but it doesn't -- and it's about time the US enshrines the Equal Rights Amendment in the supreme law of the land, Jody Heymann, Amy Raub. and Aleta Sprague write.

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What does the world view as positive freedom or negative freedom. Is being able to do what ever your heart  desire with no consequences truly freedom or is it chaos
https://www.theepochtimes.com/positive-freedom-vs-negative-freedom_3218724.html

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died

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In 2020, America needs to take action to preserve our democracy

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/opinions/global-democracy-decline-us-sedaca/index.html

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59,000 asylum seekers have been sent back to mexico. Less then 1% of them have been granted protection in the US
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/01/29/us-returns-mexico-threaten-rights-security#

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If you dont protect your rights, its going to get taken away.
https://hyperallergic.com/539618/how-to-protect-your-rights-at-us-border-crossings/

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Children in some neighborhoods don't have as much  opportunity's as others.

https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-01-22/childhood-opportunity-varies-dramatically-by-neighborhood-study-shows

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Talks about the 19th amendment, and its importance in history and journey to rights for women.

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress has sponsored an award-winning traveling exhibit to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. The University of Arkansas School of Law will host "100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future" Jan. 27-30 in the Robert and Vivian Young Law Library.

The six-banner free-standing display features historic photos and artifacts, details the story of the battle for ratification and outlines remaining challenges. University students, faculty and staff, as well as the general public, are invited to view the exhibit and learn more about this milestone of democracy during the following hours:

Monday, Jan. 27, noon-10 p.m.

Tuesday, Jan. 28, 7 a.m.-10 p.m.

Wednesday, Jan. 29, 7 a.m.-10 p.m.

Thursday, Jan. 30, 7 a.m.-noon

"We hope the campus and community will take advantage of this rare opportunity," said Margaret Sova McCabe, dean of the School of Law. "Women's suffrage is an important and all too recent part of history. As this exhibit travels the nation, it helps all of us better understand the significance of the 19th Amendment in our history."

With this exhibit, and other events throughout the year, the ABA seeks to give state and local bar associations, lawyers, judges and other legal professionals, educators and civic organizations the opportunity to celebrate 100 years of women's constitutional right to vote, to educate the public about the 19th Amendment and the battle for women's suffrage, and to promote law that ensures women's full and equal exercise of their right to vote and to participate in our democracy.

The exhibit, which won a 2019 GDUSA American Graphic Design Award, has been to more than 20 locations since its launch in August 2019, and has more than 70 additional stops scheduled before the end of 2020. From the law school, it will travel to Little Rock. It will be on view at the University of Arkansas Little Rock Bowen School of Law Jan. 31-Feb. 5 and at the Arkansas Bar Association Mid-Year meeting Feb. 6-7. For information on the exhibit and how to purchase the banners, please contact Anne P. Brown at anne.brown@americanbar.org.

"100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future" exhibitions in Little Rock and Fayetteville were made possible by the Arkansas Bar Association and its Civil Rights, Labor and Employment Law and Young Lawyers sections and the Arkansas Bar Foundation.

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School of Law Joins ABA Celebration of 100 Years of Women's Right to Vote

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress has sponsored an award-winning traveling exhibit to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. The University of Arkansas School of Law will host "100 Years After the 19th Amendment: Their Legacy, and Our Future" Jan.

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The US overwhelmingly supports human rights and environmental protection in Tibet

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US House approves Tibet bill in latest human rights challenge to Beijing

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The Tibetan Policy and Support Act of 2019 lays out a road map for sanctions against Chinese officials who interfere in the Dalai Lama's succession. The bill, which passed easily, would also block new Chinese consulates in US until Beijing lets Washington build its own diplomatic station in Tibet.

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do we have the right to say what we want?

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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3047974/us-house-approves-tibet-bill-latest-human-rights-challenge
The US House of Representatives on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to approve a bill showing Washington’s support for human rights and environmental protection in

Tibet

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Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing equality for women under the Constitution.

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Virginia has officially become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its General Assembly took the final procedural steps Monday to sign off on the measure, with women presiding over both chambers.

The move comes 12 days after the state Senate and House of Delegates made history by backing the women's rights measure. The amendment's passage in Virginia crosses the threshold necessary for it to be included in the U.S. Constitution, though legal experts are divided on if the ERA can still move forward.

The ERA would ban discrimination on the basis of sex and guarantee equality for women under the Constitution.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) praised the action, tweeting "Today marks a new ERA for the women of this country and this Commonwealth - finally, equality for women under the United States Constitution."

The vote comes decades after Congress sent the ERA to the states in 1972, passing it with bipartisan support.

But there are big legal questions as to whether the amendment will be enshrined into the Constitution.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a concluding that because the 1982 deadline for ratification has expired, it is too late for states to ratify the ERA. The department said the only option for supporters now is to kick off the ratification process all over again in Congress.

The National Archives, which certifies the ratification of constitutional amendments, said it would abide by that opinion, unless otherwise directed by a final court order.

CNN reports there are efforts in Congress to restart the ratification process and get rid of the deadline. The House will vote on Feb. 10 on whether to rescind the deadline.

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Virginia finalizes its passage of the Equal Rights Amendment

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Virginia has officially become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) after its General Assembly took the final procedural steps Monday to sign off on the measure, with women presiding over both chambers. The move comes 12 days after the state Senate and House of Delegates made history by backing the women's rights measure.

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The world is unhappier with democracy than ever
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/global-dissatisfaction-with-democracy-at-a-record-high-research-says.html

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https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/14/opinions/equal-rights-amendment-heymann-raub-sprague/index.html
there are still no equal rights between men and women.

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An "equality" act would help form a social credit systemhttps://thefederalist.com/2020/01/28/democrats-equality-act-would-be-a-big-nudge-towards-a-u-s-social-credit-system/

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The US is still not giving both biological sexes equal rights.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/14/opinions/equal-rights-amendment-heymann-raub-sprague/index.html

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The wage gap effects everyone across the world in their workplaces, even if it is supposed to be equal.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/14/opinions/equal-rights-amendment-heymann-raub-sprague/index.html

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you are born with rights and sometimes they are not respected. https://www.journalreview.com/stories/mixing-rights-privileges,111331

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Across America, children are given different opportunities based on where they live.

https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-01-22/childhood-opportunity-varies-dramatically-by-neighborhood-study-shows

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If people have better opportunities they will live longer and better lives.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-01-24/social-mobility-may-help-us-live-longer