While hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents suffered in desperate conditions following Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration turned down assistance offered by other countries.

That's according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a public-interest watchdog group. In light of its findings, CREW is calling for congressional investigations into how the United States handles offers of foreign assistance following disasters.

A Washington Post analysis of the material -- some 10,000 pages of cables, telegraphs and e-mails from U.S. diplomats around the world -- found that other nations offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash:

But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

The impoverished nation of Bangladesh, for example, offered $1 million in monetary aid and a disaster management team. The Bush administration accepted the money but turned down the disaster team. The administration also rejected tents, sheets and pillows offered by Pakistan; flooding and sanitation experts from Honduras; doctors, food, blankets and clothing from Peru; water purification equipment from Denmark; and electric generators from Israel. Other rejected aid included medical teams, body bags, bottled water and specially trained rescue dogs.

President Bush initially suggested that the United States did not need foreign assistance to deal with the disaster, telling Good Morning America on Sept. 1, 2005 that the country would "rise up and take care of it." But by the next day, the administration had reversed that policy, with the State Department directing its staff to accept all international aid offers "in principle," according to internal documents obtained by CREW.

Following press reports that international aid was being delayed because the U.S. government was slow to assess the affected areas' needs, CREW filed a FOIA request with the State Department. When officials failed to respond properly to the request, the group filed a complaint in federal court that eventually forced the agency to open its files.

In one disclosed e-mail exchange, State Department officials grappled with how to inform Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other supplies were spoiled after being exposed to the elements and heat. "tell them we blew it," one department official wrote. But then she added: "the flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. i'm willing to be persuaded but..."

In addition, the Bush administration turned down an offer of two free cruise ships from Greece, instead paying $249 million to use Carnival Cruise Lines, a company with close financial ties to the Republican Party and the Bush family. The administration also turned down numerous offers of troops and search-and-rescue teams.

Speaking yesterday on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blamed the aid debacle on the disaster's unprecedented nature:

Look, the fact is that we received a lot of very generous offers from people at the time of Katrina. It was a new circumstance. The United States is, frankly, not accustomed to receiving large-scale foreign assistance offers.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), chair of the Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that she's committed to asking hard questions about the foreign aid problems:

"Louisiana and the Gulf Coast deserve better," Landrieu said. "And while we did not seek handouts, a hand up was and remains sorely needed." She promised to "get to the bottom of how this administration could so foolishly turn away an outreached hand in a time of such desperate need."

To view some of the materials obtained by CREW, click here.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

The Bush administration yesterday announced that it would extend temporary housing assistance to survivors of Hurricane Katrina for another 18 months, until March 1, 2009. The program, which had already been extended, was set to expire on Aug. 31.

About 80,000 Gulf Coast residents are still living in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers.

"We understand the importance of minimizing uncertainty for Gulf Coast residents who have endured this unprecedented tragedy," Gulf Coast Rebuilding Coordinator Donald Powell said in a statement. "This coordinated, 18-month extension will provide stability to residents while providing effective incentives and assistance to help them transition into long-term housing solutions."

FEMA also announced that it would transfer management of the much-criticized housing assistance program to the Department of Housing and Urban Development by Sept. 1. GCR, HUD and FEMA said they would consult with Congress on the most appropriate structure for transferring those responsibilities.

In addition, evacuees receiving assistance will be required to make small monthly payments beginning next March; the payments will start at $50 per month and increase to $100 per month in June 2008. That announcement drew criticism from ACORN, a grassroots group that's played a lead role in advocating for Katrina survivors' housing needs.

"Charging rent for people to live in FEMA trailers is unfair," said Gwendolyn Adams, co-chair of the Lower 9th Ward chapter of ACORN. "No one chose to have their home deluged and destroyed. Folks are working hard against all sorts of barriers to return and rebuild ... and this is yet another obstacle."

Toni McElroy, president of Texas ACORN, called on the administration to "get serious about rebuilding housing and infrastructure in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, so that our people can finally come home."

A good first step, McElroy said, would be for President Bush to support H.R. 1227, The Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery Act, which would forbid HUD from demolishing livable public housing and require one for one replacement if demolition is necessary, require HUD to prioritize applications to repair or rebuild Section 8 housing, and encourage the building of affordable housing by extending the deadline for developers to use GO ZONE tax credits.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

A surprise witness has surfaced in a federal lawsuit scheduled to begin in July against a private Alabama-based coal company that allegedly colluded with a right-wing paramilitary group to murder union leaders in Colombia.

Attorneys suing the Drummond Co. of Birmingham, Ala. this week filed legal documents revealing they have found a new witness who claims the company supplied and directed the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the Birmingham News reports:

Edwin Manuel Guzman was a sergeant in the Colombian Army and is now in that country's witness protection program, according to a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Birmingham.

Guzman, the filings said, served in a Colombian army unit that helped guard Drummond's coal mine and rail lines. He is prepared to testify that he saw the Birmingham-based company supply a right-wing armed outlaw group and direct its military activities.

Because the trial is scheduled to begin so soon, the judge in the case will have to grant special permission for Guzman to testify.

Filed in 2002 by the Colombian trade union Sintramienergetica and the estates of murdered union leaders Valmore Lacarno Rodriquez, Victor Hugo Orcasita Amaya and Gustavo Soler Mora, the lawsuit was brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act, Torture Victim Protection Act and state tort law. It alleges that Drummond "hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced" leaders of the union representing workers at Drummond facilities in Colombia. The murders occurred while contract negotiations with Drummond were underway.

The lawsuit does not name the actual killers but claims the company directed the murders. Drummond relocated much of its Alabama coal operations to civil war-wracked Colombia in the 1980s, resulting in layoffs for some 2,000 United Mine Workers of America members. More than 1,900 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia since 1991, according to the peace group Drummond Watch.

Drummond denies any involvement with illegal groups or the trade unionists' deaths. In a statement released last month, the company reported that it filed slander and defamation charges against Rafael Garcia, a former officer with Colombia's federal police who has claimed he saw Augusto Jimenez -- Drummond's former top executive in Colombia -- give $200,000 in cash to the leader of a right-wing paramilitary.

Colombia is not the only country where trade unionists face the risk of extreme violence. As Facing South reported last week, the tied and beaten corpse of Farm Labor Organizing Committee leader Santiago Rafael Cruz was found earlier this month in the union's Mexico-based office in Monterrey. Labor leaders, politicians and human rights groups are urging Mexican police to consider political motives in their investigation of his death.

Labels: Work and Community

For politics-watchers like myself, sometimes it's hard to tell whether events that the media hypes as "a major sea change" -- growing opposition to the Iraq war (even in Kentucky!), the 2006 mid-term elections -- are in reality just small and fleeting episodes, or truly a sign that something deeper is happening in the country.

In many cases, it's only with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight that we realize the real "turning points" and "watershed moments" of history -- for example, President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act and changing the course of Southern politics (and by extension, national politics) forever.

Today, with President Bush's poll numbers precipitously sinking, and disaffection with foreign wars and domestic scandals growing, there's a sense that the pendulum of U.S. politics may be swinging -- not just a little, but with certainty -- away from the conservative dominance seen at least since the Reagan era.

But is a deeper, lasting shift truly underway? Prof. Lawrence Goodwyn, a long-time scholar of U.S. politics with whom I co-taught a class at Duke University, believes it could be. The Texan, who wrote one of the first major studies of U.S. populism, writes a fascinating piece in The Nation this week in which he argues that the "intransigence and myopia" of the current administration, coupled with growing fortitude on the part of Democrats in challenging the war and unequal economy, have created a moment ripe for "political realignment."

It's a "deep" think piece, and worth the read. Here are a few choice excerpts.

[I]n climes far from comfortable lobbyists, activists have organized petitions for local environmental laws even as people in midsize towns stepped up pressure for living-wage ordinances as benchmarks for all city workers. Indeed, agitation for a revived push for an Equal Rights Amendment, visible at local levels soon after the November election and at state levels in December, has now gathered momentum in both the House and Senate. This kind of politics is not about the next election; it is about people coming up for air and getting something done that has a chance to get done. Nor is this effort a magic bullet to dispatch globalization. It is not instant and it does not begin large-scale but emerges from the interaction of popular aspirations and cooperating elites. It is out there in America now--much more vividly than before the November elections. It will be expanding. [...]

The Iraq disaster undermines the Republicans but will not in itself bring party realignment. Rather, the energizing momentum is economic--and it is driven by abiding public anxiety here in America. Ahead in Washington are the sharpest kinds of party divisions over domestic policy. The signals are everywhere. The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, began by mobilizing all 233 Democrats to co-sponsor the minimum-wage bill. On their first opportunity to decamp, eighty-two Republicans did so. The final tally--an early harbinger of the realigned future--was 315 to 116. After redistricting in response to the 2010 census, it does not seem out of line to envision something approaching a Democratic margin of 275 to 160. The path to these numbers travels through Social Security, the issue that, as Bush has already experienced, remains the third rail of American politics. Debate before the 2008 election should produce the first of many win-win options for the Democrats: Either enough GOP senators defect to protect themselves as well as Social Security, or they don't defect and boost their own vulnerability at the polls. Of forty-nine GOP-held Senate seats, twenty-one are up for grabs. [...]

Goodwyn also compares our current moment to 1930-1932, when President Hoover was disgraced and a certain politician named Roosevelt stepped forward with a different vision (although, as Goodwyn is careful to note, FDR himself didn't bring change -- it was forced on him by progressives, especially unions -- but he at least put up less resistance).

Just like 77 years ago, Goodwyn believes, our economy is facing a deep crisis -- then is was the depression, today it's a warped form of globalization that's cheered by Wall Street but causes deep insecurity on Main Street.

But this grim situation -- and growing discontent across the country -- are no promise of political change. I agree with Goodwyn that this depends largely on the clarity and power of the vision that those opposing the current agenda offer -- which requires both compelling leaders and a political movement.

Only when people see powerful alternatives to the status quo will the events unfolding around us today truly become "a major sea change."

Labels: politics

In five weeks, the 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry of the 82nd Airborne, based at North Carolina's Fort Bragg, has lost 18 soldiers in Iraq.

The squadron went into Diyala province with 330 troops. Now, the casualties have some so quickly and so fast that, as Kara Honbarger -- wife of a deployed squadron chaplain and mother of three -- told the Raleigh News & Observer, "we get nervous when the doorbell rings."

The N&O followed up today by telling more about the nine soldiers who died this week:

Nearly all of them came from small towns scattered across the United States. They were killed in a village so small it doesn't appear on most maps of Iraq.

One of the nine men had been a professional bull rider before enlisting in the Army. Some had fathers who had been in the military. One said he wanted to serve in Iraq to help the kids, and another kept asking his mother to send crayons, candy and toys to hand out. [...]

Kevin Gaspers(First Lieutenant, 26, Hastings, Neb.): Gaspers is described by friends as a country boy with a patriotic streak and a sense of humor.

Ryen King (Specialist, 19, Bowersville, Ga.): [When asked why he joined the Army, Ryen said:] "I need to serve and establish myself on my own." In e-mail to his father April 5, King, 19, wondered what life might have been like had he not joined the military but instead gone straight to college.

Garret Knoll (Private First Class, 23, Bad Axe, Mich.): His job -- saving lives as an Army medic -- made sense because he loved life so much. "He was a happy-go-lucky kid," Brady said. "He was very friendly. One thing I remember is his sense of humor. He was very sharp, very witty. And he had a nice circle of friends." ... Knoll had been a soldier less than a year. His grandmother said he had been in Iraq just two months.

Kenneth E. Locker Jr. (Staff Sergeant, 28, Wakefield, Neb.): He had shrapnel in his neck and hearing loss from a land mine explosion last fall, but Locker stayed in Iraq, where he felt the children needed him ... "He said, 'Dad, do you know why I'm over there?' " Ken Locker Sr. said. '"I'm over there for the children, that they might have a safer world to live in.'"

Randell Marshall (Sergeant, 22, Fitzgerald, Ga.): Marshall joined the Army in February 2005. Just more than two years later, he had decorations including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. "He was a hard-core paratrooper," Sgt. Josh Meismer, who served with Marshall in Iraq, said in a statement. "He was a professional bull rider before joining the Army, and he took that determination into his job in the unit."

William Clint Moore (Staff Sergeant, 27, Benson, NC): "He wanted to serve God and his country. That's all he ever talked about doing," said Moore's sister, Leanne Benson of Benson.

Brice Pearson (Sergeant, 32, Phoenix): At 32, Pearson was the oldest soldier to die in the attack, and the only one from a large city, Phoenix. He hadn't been in the Army any longer than many of the younger soldiers, joining in 2004 ... "Brice didn't talk about work much off duty, but he always wanted to know how his guys were doing."

Michael J. Rodriguez (Specialist, 20, Sanford, NC): With a father who served in the Army and a mother who was in the Air Force, Rodriguez moved many times. Stone said he always knew where he'd end up: in the military. And though he confessed in phone calls with Stone to daydreaming about hiking in the Smokies or fishing in the Holston River in East Tennessee, he told his mother he believed in what he was doing in Iraq.

Michael Vaughan (Sergeant, 20, Otis, Ore.): Last month when he was home in Otis, Ore., on leave from Iraq, Vaughan said that he didn't want to return. "He had seen enough," his father, George Vaughan, told The Oregonian. "He wanted to come home and go to school." "He said it was crazy, more or less," said [friend] Jesse Branum. "He said he saw a lot of things that you wouldn't believe, was how he put it."

The toll of the loss to Fort Bragg and the state can't be measured in dollars and cents. But it's part of the escalating impact of war on North Carolina, even as state leaders try to expand the state's dependence on military dollars.

Labels: iraq, north carolina, peace and security

As you've probably heard by now, the Iraq Supplemental Funding bill which also includes provisions to begin troop withdrawals was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday by a 218 to 208 vote, largely along party lines. The Senate has just passed the bill today by a vote of 51-46, also mostly along party lines.

The bill will now make its way to the White House for Bush's promised veto, possibly on the fourth anniversary of his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech.

Looking at the AP roll call for yesterday's House vote, Southern* Representatives voted against the bill 83 to 53, with three not voting.

Four Southern Democrats "crossed over" to vote against the bill. They were Barrow and Marshall from Georgia, Taylor from Mississippi, and Lincoln Davis from Tennessee. (Lewis of Georgia voted against the bill, but for a different reason, see below.) Only one Southern Republican, Jones of North Carolina, "crossed over" to vote for the bill.

(For purposes of this report. "Southern" includes Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. These states have a total of 139 representatives, with 58 Democrats and 81 Republicans.)

It's not clear why the war in Iraq is a partisan issue, especially at this point, other than blind loyalty to the President and the party he leads. (Just as it isn't clear why global warming, the energy crisis, poverty, civil rights and others are partisan issues, but those are stories for another day.)

At any rate, this is essentially political theater at this point, surrounding a highly-charged partisan showdown with the President. So you would expect the voting to be mostly along party lines. What you might not expect is for any Southern Democrat to side with supporters of the war considering the fact that the South bears a disproportionate share of the burden for the war.

Here's what two of them had to say:

Barrow of Georgia: "That's no way to fight a war." (There's also some circular logic regarding "acts of Congress.")

Lincoln Davis of Tennessee: " I have been clear with leadership from day one that I can't support a bill with a day certain for withdrawal without waiver provisions."

And from the principled vote against the whole mess:

Lewis of Georgia: "I will not and cannot in good conscience vote for another dollar or another dime to support this war. Thank you, Mr. Speaker."

Labels: iraq, peace and security, Southern Politics

The U.S. House of Representatives last month passed H.R. 1227, a measure that would reopen minimally damaged New Orleans public housing units closed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The bill has now moved to the Senate, but Louisiana's Sens. Mary Landrieu (D) and David Vitter (R) have not stepped up to provide the leadership the measure needs to pass.

That's why ColorOfChange.org -- an organization that aims to strengthen black America's political voice -- is asking concerned citizens to call on the senators to show leadership and urge the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs to take up the measure immediately. To add your name to the message the group will be sending the Senators, click here. To learn more about the effort to halt the demolition of public housing in New Orleans, click here.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

An audit conducted by a fair housing advocacy group has documented extensive racial discrimination in the New Orleans area rental housing market.

Released yesterday by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, the 2007 Fair Housing Rental Study -- titled "For Rent, Unless You're Black" -- found a 57.5 percent rate of racial discrimination in metro New Orleans rental housing searches. In other words, in nearly six out of every 10 transactions, African-American testers with the same jobs, credit, career paths, income, family types and rental histories as white testers were treated less favorably by landlords.

The discrimination did not involve the use of racial slurs or outright statements of racism, the audit found:

Instead, strategies were covert. Housing providers simply didn't return phone calls from African American testers, didn't provide applications to African American testers, and/or didn't show available rental units to African American testers.

The GNOFHAC conducted a total of 40 tests in four parishes: Orleans (9 tests), Jefferson (20 tests), St. Tammany (10 tests) and St. Bernard (1 test). It based the number of tests conducted in each parish on post-hurricane population estimates from the 2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey. The rental housing units included in the audit were selected randomly from print and Internet listings of available units.

Of those tests conducted in Jefferson Parish, differential treatment occurred in 50 percent of the cases. That figure was 60 percent in St. Tammany, 55 percent in Orleans and 100 percent in St. Bernard.

Discriminatory treatment fell into several categories: difference in access to appointments to view units, which occurred in 20 percent of the tests; information regarding availability of units (40 percent); access to applications (35 percent); terms and conditions (12.5 percent); favorability of units shown (5 percent); access to waiting lists (5 percent); and response to voice messages (20 percent).

In one example from Orleans Parish, an African-American tester who had made an appointment to view two available units showed up and was told there was only one unit available -- and was allowed only to peek into its window. Later that same day, a white tester responding to the same advertisement was greeted by the same agent, encouraged to view a luxury unit that had not been shown to the African-American tester, and was allowed to view the two available units. The white tester was also told of another unit that would soon be available, information that was not shared with the African-American tester.

In the introduction to the report, GNOFHAC President Anthony Keck acknowledged that racial discrimination was a problem in the metro area's housing market even before Hurricane Katrina. However, he noted that the disaster made addressing the problem even more urgent:

Post-Katrina, we face entirely new challenges, where decisions and actions by those in power have the potential to cement in place for the next 100 years entirely new patterns of discrimination on a grand scale -- not just in housing, but in health care, education and most other social institutions.

Already, an alarming number of local politicians in Orleans, Jefferson and surrounding parishes have actively tried to discourage the poor -- disproportionately Black, Latino, single mothers, disabled or the elderly -- from returning home by blocking the construction of multi-family housing in their districts, towns or Parishes. The prevalent but unchallenged notion in our public discourse of "not wanting to concentrate poverty" is more of an insult than a remedy. Who is deciding what level of income and housing price is good and what level is bad? Why don't we instead "concentrate" on building the local small businesses, parks, schools, police force and health clinics to support vibrant communities regardless of class, income, race, disability, and national origin? It may simply be easier for our leaders to tear down rather than build up.

The report offers several recommendations to address the problem. They include making fair housing a primary component in the rebuilding process, getting business owners and developers involved, expanding private fair housing initiatives, funding fair housing enforcement and education, holding state and local agencies accountable for upholding the Fair Housing Act, and dedicating resources to preserve and expand affordable rental housing.

Labels: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch

After the election debacle of 2000, Florida hoped it wouldn't be in the news for voting problems again. But then came the 2006 mid-terms and 18,000 disappeared votes in Sarasota County -- and with it, seemingly unstoppable momentum for election reform.

But now, momentum for reform has stalled, with voting reform advocates saying -- in an echo of the national U.S. attorney scandal -- that Republicans are using fears of "election fraud" to push 14 measures that will restrict voter registration and turnout. The Associated Press reports:

An elections bill that would virtually rid the state of touch-screen voting machines and move Florida's presidential primary to late January lost the support of Democrats and voter advocacy groups Tuesday when a Senate committee added measures opponents said would hurt voter registration drives.

What had been a largely bipartisan push to answer Republican Gov. Charlie Crist's call to replace touch-screen voting machines in 15 counties with a verifiable paper-trail system became a 3-2, party-line vote in the Senate Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations committee.

Here are the amendments that the GOP-led committee has been adding to the bill, which originally was focused on creating a voter paper trail:

* One amendment reinforces penalties on third-party voter registration groups when they fail to pass on registration information to elections officials within specified periods of time.

* Another reduces the number of forms of identification that are permissible when showing up to vote.

* A third requires supervisors of elections to provide the Department of State with information such as demographic data and individual vote histories for each precinct within 35 days of an election, which critics say will be used for voter targeting.

Even with the loss of Democratic and public interest group support, the Republican majority is moving forward with the bill.

Labels: election reform, Florida

Results are in for 2007 first-quarter campaign fundraising, and once again it's clear the U.S. political system is awash in money. Today we'll look at the U.S. Senate, where 33 seats will be up for grabs in 2008, including 12 in the South.

As we noted earlier, only a handful of Senate races are predicted to be seriously competitive (and only four or so in the South) -- but that hasn't stopped millions from being shoveled into Senate race coffers. From January to March of this year, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee raised an astounding $13.7 million for next year's contests, compared to just $7 million for their GOP counterpart.

Who have been the top Senate money-raisers this year? Here were the top five in the South, measured by receipts from Jan-March 2007:

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) - $1,794,751
Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) - $1,775,385
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) - $1,743,692
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) - $1,041,956
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) - $984,036

What, you ask, about legendary money magnets like Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)? None have brought in big hauls this year -- but don't cry for them, Argentina. They have $11,765,039, $7,425,344 and $2,608,036, respectively, already sitting in their bank accounts.

Labels: Election 2008

Mohammed Atta, the man named by the FBI as one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 terrorist strikes against the United States, had previously investigated the possibility of carrying out an attack on a chemical plant in eastern Tennessee. Had the facility's tanks holding about 250 tons of sulfur dioxide been blown up, as many as 60,000 people could have been killed or seriously injured by the resulting toxic vapor cloud, the Washington Post reported.

But the nation's chemical security problem is certainly not limited to a handful of plants like the one in Tennessee. An analysis by the Congressional Research Service released two years ago found that there were more than 100 facilities that each place upwards of 1 million people at risk from a toxic chemical release, and more than 400 additional facilities that place between 100,000 and 1 million people at risk.

Many of these dangerous facilities are in the South. In fact, Texas has by far the most plants -- 29 -- where a worst-case release could affect 1 million or more nearby residents. And a list of recent accidents at chemical facilities compiled by the Associated Press found seven incidents since 2006, with most of them taking place in the South.

Responding to watchdogs' warnings, Congress last fall passed a temporary law giving the Department of Homeland Security the authority to regulate the nation's most hazardous chemical plants, and DHS released its new rule earlier this month. But after reviewing that rule, the United Steelworkers union says it fails to adequately protect plant workers and nearby communities.

"The Homeland Security rules for the nation's high risk chemical plants fall far short of what is needed to truly make facilities safe from terrorist attacks," said USW President Leo W. Gerard in a press release. "It's another example of the Bush Administration's attempt to appear as if it is taking care of industrial safety problems. Security actions alone are insufficient to protect workers and communities."

DHS estimates that as many as 66,000 plants nationwide present a potential chemical threat, according to the AP. About a third of those are already regulated by other agencies, and DHS is asking the owners of the remaining plants to complete an online questionnaire within 60 days disclosing what they manufacture, what chemicals they store, in what quantities, and in what type of storage.

Gerard noted that the rule fails to require plants to use safer technologies and less hazardous chemicals. In addition, it does not involve employees in plant safety and offers no protections for whistle blowers.

Another concern raised by the USW is the fact that the new rule could preempt existing state security laws. For example, the new federal rule trumps state laws that gives the public any information DHS considers as making a plant more vulnerable to security risks -- a provision that USW says could deprive workers of the right to know what chemicals they're handling.

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff told the AP that the federal rules would override only those state rules that directly conflict with the federal ones. Meanwhile, a bill introduced in Congress to ensure more lax federal rules would not eclipse stricter state regulations has stalled.

The law that gave DHS the authority to craft the rule is a watered-down, chemical industry-approved version of a proposal the Bush administration considered back in 2003. The earlier legislative package -- crafted with the help of then-DHS chief Tom Ridge and former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman -- was thwarted by White House Office of Management and Budget Counsel Philip Perry, who also happens to be Vice President Dick Cheney's son-in-law, according to the Washington Monthly:

A flippant critic might say the father-in-law has been prosecuting a war that creates more terrorists abroad, while the son-in-law has been working to ensure they’ll have easy targets at home. But it’s more precise to say that White House officials really, really don’t want to alienate the chemical industry, and Perry has been really, really willing to help them not do it.

The new security rule does not set a timetable for changes or require the industry to take any specific measures to boost security. The USW suggests that if the feds were really serious about improving security at the nation's chemical plants, they would require the employment of sufficient and qualified personnel to meet the requirements; strengthen the recordkeeping and reporting requirements for process malfunctions or any attempted terrorist attack; define the need for emergency response, safe shut down, evacuation and decontamination procedures in case of an attack or malfunction; and put in place effective training requirements for workers in covered facilities.

The environmental group Greenpeace has also called on the new Congress to pass a strong permanent law that would protect communities from chemical disasters. Last July, the House Homeland Security Committee tried to do just that, but the measure was never allowed to go to the House floor.

Labels: environment

In this earlier report on an investigation into the application of the death penalty around the South, we noted that Tennessee's death penalty came under fire when it was discovered that the procedure manual for lethal injection advises executioners to have fire extinguishers at the ready and has instructions to "engage the automatic rheostat" and afterwards to "disconnect electrical cables" before allowing a doctor to examine the inmate to determine if the lethal injection was successful.

Legal challenges which exposed these bizarre procedures prompted Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen to declare a moratorium on executions until a review of the state's lethal injection procedures could be conducted. The moratorium is set to expire on May 2nd.

Yesterday, the American Bar Association issued a finding of more serious problems and recommended that the moratorium be extended and that the review of Tennessee's death penalty should be expanded:

A team of Tennessee legal experts, working under the auspices of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, today cited problems in the state's use of capital punishment that range from excessive caseloads and inadequate standards for defense counsel to racial disparities and inadequate review of death row inmates’ claims of actual innocence.

The team concluded that Tennessee’s death penalty system is so flawed that a temporary halt in executions should be continued to permit a thorough review of every aspect of capital punishment administration in the state. It urged Gov. Phil Bredesen to continue past May 2 a stay he initially imposed on Tennessee executions to examine protocols for administering lethal injection, the execution method used in the state.

"Gov. Bredesen clearly has given sober consideration to how executions are carried out in Tennessee," said American Bar Association President Karen J. Mathis. "Now it is time for him, and for the state as a whole, to devote even more thorough analysis to how the state reaches the decision to sentence someone to death. The families and friends of capital crime victims in Tennessee, the people accused of committing those crimes, and the citizens who place their trust in their legal system deserve better justice than they are now receiving," she said.

According to their press release, the ABA takes no position on the death penalty or the method of execution, but they "urge a moratorium on executions in each jurisdiction until fairness and due process are assured in death penalty cases."

Concluding a three-year study of Tennessee's death penalty according to ABA protocols for "a fair and accurate capital case system that complies with constitutional standards," legal experts found that "Tennessee meets only seven of the standards, partially meets 31 of them, and fails to comply with 26 of them." There was not enough information available to assess compliance with 29 of the protocols.

The report urges Tennessee to extend the moratorium and to expand the scope of its review of the death penalty and makes the following specific recommendations:

• Create an independent commission to review claims of factual innocence, with power to investigate, hold

• Create an independent statewide authority to appoint, train and monitor defense, appellate and post-conviction lawyers in capital cases

• Require preservation and storage of all biological evidence in capital cases as long as defendant remains incarcerated

• Develop statewide protocols to standardize decisions about which cases are charged as capital crimes

• Increase qualification standards and monitoring procedures for defense, appellate and post-conviction lawyers in capital cases

• Provide a right to post-conviction counsel before, not after, filing of post conviction petitions

• Amend court rules to allow defendants to obtain expert and investigative services at any time after being charged, providing an opportunity to demonstrate why a capital charge may be inappropriate

• Include in proportionality review cases in which the death penalty could have been sought but was not, and cases in which the penalty was sought but not imposed

• Require judges presiding over trials resulting in first degree murder convictions to file complete proportionality reports

• Assure each death row inmate an opportunity for a hearing before the Board of Pardon and Parole

• Redraft capital jury instructions to prevent misunderstandings

• Sponsor a state study to determine if there are disparities in capital sentencing based on race, socio-economic status, geography or other factors

• Exclude from eligibility for execution people with serious mental disorders

• Adopt a uniform state standard to determine defendants’ competency through trial, appeals and post-conviction proceedings.

These findings and recommendations are similar to the findings of a recent three-part investigative report by the McClatchy Newspapers into dozens of death penalty cases around the South.

The ABA is studying the death penalty in eight states, including Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The full report on Tennessee is available here (PDF format). Reports that have been completed for other states can be accessed here.

Labels: criminal justice, death penalty

Infant mortality -- babies dying in their first year -- is considered a "bellwether" health issue by public health experts. A tragedy in and of itself, growing numbers of babies dying also signals a stress on the overall health of a community or region, being closely linked to other health problems like hypertension and obesity, and correlated strongly with poverty and larger "stressors."

That makes the recent news reported in the New York Times especially disturbing, that infant mortality rates in the South -- after years of stabilization or decline -- are now on the rise:

For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states. [...]

“I don’t think the rise is a fluke, and it’s a disturbing trend, not only in Mississippi but throughout the Southeast,” said Dr. Christina Glick, a neonatologist in Jackson, Miss., and past president of the National Perinatal Association.

To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

Infant deaths are also a product of racial inequality:

Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.)

Why the rise? The story looks at a number of contributing factors; one of the most obvious is the undermining of state-based Child Health Insurance Programs (CHIP). For example, here's what's happened in Mississippi:

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.

As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. According to the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program in Jackson, some eligible pregnant women were deterred by the new procedures from enrolling.

The NY Times story doesn't look at the international picture, which helps put the issue in perspective. The U.S. has one of the highest (if not the highest) infant mortality rates in the industrialized world; at least 20 countries rank ahead of the U.S. Which points to another possible factor: the U.S. is the only industrialized country without a national health program.

Labels: public health

With Congress and the White House deadlocked on immigration, state legislatures have filled the void with a flurry of bills, making it one of the hottest state issues in 2007.

According to a new survey released by the National Conference on State Legislatures, immigration bills have surfaced in every state -- at least 1169 bills and resolutions related to immigration or immigrants and refugees in all. This is more than twice the total number of introduced bills (570) in 2006.

Issues around benefits, employment and law enforcement are the biggest; there have also been 104 resolution counseling federal lawmakers on what to do. As might be expected, the vast majority are measures aimed at limiting immigration or curtailing access of benefits to immigrants.

Out of the 1,000+ bills up for discussion, only 57 have been enacted so far. Some examples from the South:

Arkansas H 1024 - Prohibits state agencies from contracting with businesses that employ illegal immigrants.

South Carolina S 531 - Requests the Governor to declare by Executive Order that no illegal alien is eligible to receive public benefits.

Virginia H 1673 - Creates the Commission on Immigration as an advisory commission.

As for resolutions, Arkansas passed a typical non-binding measure: HR 1003, which Addresses the President of the United States and Congress to secure our nations borders and to develop a comprehensive immigration policy.

Clearly, the failure of national lawmakers to articulate a federal immigration policy isn't causing the issue to go away -- it's just being displaced to state legislatures, where, especially in Sunbelt states, conservative policy-making is gaining the upper hand.

Labels: immigration

We've been covering a lot of environmental issues here at Facing South lately (especially Sue Sturgis, our resident environmental reporter).

In celebration of Earth Day, here are some highlights of Facing South's recent coverage of the good news and the bad news concerning the South's natural heritage and community health:

Alabama Aims to Fuel Nuclear Revival (4/19/07) (also check out Randy's follow-up on the Tennessee Valley Authority's dubious environmental record)

Massive Crop Damage Around the South (4/10/07)

Climate Action Rallies Put Spotlight on Global Warming (4/9/07) plus More Grim News on Global Warming (4/6/07)

EPA, Carbon and the South (4/3/07)

Our Toxic South (4/2/07)

There's more good stuff further back in the archives, just use that Google Search box in the upper left-hand corner.

Happy Earth Day!

Labels: environment

On April 9, the tied and beaten body of Santiago Rafael Cruz -- a leader of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee -- was found dead in the union's Mexico-based office in Monterrey. Few leads have turned up, but FLOC President Baldamar Velasquez is convinced Cruz's torture and murder were "a pure political attack" to intimidate workers. In a Facing South exclusive, Sandy Smith-Nonini reports on what's known about the case and the dangers faced by workers aiming to organize across borders.

MURDER IN NUEVO LEON

By Sandy Smith-Nonini

The April 9 torture and murder of a Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) employee in Mexico has all the marks of a political assassination, according to several labor leaders, politicians and human rights groups who are urging Mexican police to consider political motives in their investigation.

To date, police handling the case in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon have made no arrests and report few leads in the killing of Santiago Rafael Cruz, 29. A recently hired manager of FLOC’s Monterrey office, Cruz’s body was found in the office last Monday morning, tied hand and foot and badly beaten. Some wonder if the assassination is linked to FLOC’s efforts to clean up corruption in recruitment of “guestworkers” for North Carolina tobacco farms under the federal H2A visa program.

“This is not looking like it was a crime of theft or a random act of violence, but rather a targeted attack on FLOC,” said Michael Hale, a spokesperson in FLOC’s headquarters in Toledo, Ohio.

FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez called the killing “a pure political attack” intended as a “message to the union to back down. But we have no intention of going away. We are going to stay and fight for our rights.”

Read the rest of the story after the jump ...

Labels: investigative reporting, Work and Community

As a follow up to Chris's post today, here's more background on TVA's nuclear power program.

TVA held a public hearing this week inviting public comment on the environmental impact statement for completing the Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power facility. The Knoxville News Sentinel has this report.

According to the article, TVA has already written off $1.7 billion on the project in 2001. It took 23 years to complete Watts Bar 1 at a cost of $6.9 billion. (Which I believe is more than TVA has spent on pollution controls at all of its coal-fired power plants during its entire existence.)

TVA is also set to restart Browns Ferry Unit 1 next month. Browns Ferry was shut down in 1985 when it was discovered that the plant's construction did not match the blueprints.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), TVA "has maintained BFN Unit 1 shut down and in a layup condition since 1985 when it voluntarily shut down and maintained shutdown of all three BFN units due to poor performance (i.e., significant enforcement actions, several operational events, equipment failures, and management's inability to identify and correct problems)." Units 2 and 3 were restarted in the 1990s.

Prior to that, a 1975 fire that started when a candle being used by engineers to locate an air leak ignited insulation around some wiring shut down the entire reactor cooling system and all it's redundant backups. The event nearly led to a reactor core meltdown, but improvised measures prevented a Tennessee Valley Chernobyl.

More recently, in April of 2004 the NRC served TVA with notice of a Severity Level III violation at Browns Ferry involving improper welds in the reactor "torus" (a suppression chamber surrounding the reactor as part of its containment system).

Even more recently, in April of this year the NRC cited a contractor at Browns Ferry for "deliberate misconduct" leading to a 2004 safety violation that exposed workers to radioactive contamination.

Given TVA's nuclear power safety record and their massive debt related to cost overruns for nuclear power facilities including some that were scrapped, should TVA be in the nuclear power business? Are there better alternatives (such as the pebble bed reactor)? And what about nuclear waste disposal?

Here's another good article on the controversy.

Labels: nuclear power

After Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the industry's failure to deliver on promises of providing energy "too cheap to meter" (even with over $115 billion in federal subsidies since 1947), the future of nuclear energy had looked grim. A new reactor hasn't come on line in over 10 years.

But Alabama and the Tennessee Valley Authority are about to change all that, as The Birmingham News reports:

One day next month, workers at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens will start a chain reaction in the Unit 1 reactor and begin making enough electricity to power 650,000 homes.

It will be the first reactor to come online in America in more than a decade.

The Tennessee Valley Authority's decision to restart the reactor it shut down 22 years ago puts Alabama at the forefront of a nuclear-power resurgence in the United States.

"I'll regard this as another milestone in a journey of nuclear power toward securing its place as an energy source for the future of America," Dale E. Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said.

The Browns Ferris plant puts Alabama and the South at the forefront of a hoped-for national nuclear revival, the News notes:

Utilities have announced plans to seek federal licenses in the next two years to build up to 30 reactors. They are lining up to take advantage of federal incentives for the first few projects completed.

One interesting point: Alabama doesn't need the extra power. The new facility is for export of energy to rapidly-growing nearby Southern states like Georgia -- a demand that critics believe could be headed off by greater efforts at conservation:

Alabama already produces more electricity than it uses, with the excess going to power other areas in the fast-growing South.

Net electricity generation in Alabama in 2005 was 137.9 million megawatts, according to a report released in March by the federal Energy Information Administration. The same year, 89.2 million megawatts were sold in the state, meaning state power companies produced 55 percent more electricity than their customers needed.

Sara Barczak, safe energy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said Alabama and the rest of the Southeast could delay the need for new power plants for years by conserving power.

"If you're in a different state that's in a major supply crunch, that's one thing," she said. "But I don't see that Alabama is there and, secondly, they've got a long way to go in terms of energy efficiency."

Labels: Alabama, nuclear power

The Public Citizen Health Research Group has a new report out on state Medicaid programs across the U.S. The report, based primarily on data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, examines Medicaid programs based on four major criteria: eligibility, scope of services, quality of care, and reimbursement. A scoring system is used to rank states in each category and overall.

The report's major findings:

Nationally, the state Medicaid programs are severely challenged: even the best state scores only 645.9 points on a scale of 1000. And the worst state rates a score of only 317.8, i.e., less than a third of the total maximum points.

The state-by-state breakdowns reveal marked disparities between and among states. The top 10 states, ranking #1 to #10, tend to cluster in the Northeast but also include three states in the Midwest and two in the Northwest. The following states occupy the first 10 ranks, in descending order: Massachusetts, Nebraska, Vermont, Alaska, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York, Washington, and New Hampshire.

The 10 most deficient state programs have overall scores ranging from between 317.8 and 379.1 of the total 1000 points. The worst, in order from 50th to 41st, are in Mississippi, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Indiana, South Carolina, Colorado, Alabama, and Missouri.

The overall score of top-ranked Massachusetts is more than twice that of bottom-ranked Mississippi.

Regarding the overall state-by-state rankings:

The 10 best states and the 10 worst states tend to cluster geographically. Half of those that rank in the top 10 are in the Northeast: Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New York, and New Hampshire. Another three -- Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota -- are in the Midwest. An additional two are in the Northwest: Washington and Alaska. The 10 worst states also show a geographic pattern, with three of them in the South (Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama) and four in the south central part of the country: Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

The report also says that "states whose Medicaid programs rank the lowest also tend to fare poorly in overall health rankings," and that "states’ ranks tend to correlate with median household income." The report finds that despite federal matching formulas intended to address inequalities, the poorest states that have the most need for the program have the worst services.

The report concludes:

Our findings make it clear that there are large numbers of people who need to be, but are not, eligible; need to have access to a wider scope of services; need to benefit from better quality health care; or need to have access to more providers than are available because state reimbursement policies make their participation difficult if not impossible. Yet these critically needed additions are “voluntary” on the part of states rather than mandated nationally. The fact that many states have chosen to go beyond the federal legal requirements suggests that they are responding to constituent needs and public pressures, and that the “floor” of mandated Medicaid coverage is clearly inadequate.

[..]

Much of the current debate has focused on the program’s sustainability. But more important is the question of whether the program, as it currently operates, is worth sustaining. Each of the categories we have examined pose problems that require attention at the national level and cannot be solved on a state-by-state basis.

Here are some highlights from around the South:

Alabama

• "Alabama’s Medicaid program ranks 42nd overall, brought down by its placement among the bottom three states in two of the four categories, eligibility and scope of services. These two categories are both affected by the state’s failure to cover those who are made poor by their extreme medical expenses, known as the medically needy."

• "In terms of Quality of Care, however, Alabama does better than most states."

Arkansas

• "Arkansas’s Medicaid program scores range widely by category. The state ranks among the bottom 10 in two of the categories assessed."

• "[A ranking of 43rd in Scope of Services] means that even if people qualify for the program, they may not have access to many services provided to Medicaid recipients in states with a broader benefits package."

• "With respect to Quality of Care, the state occupies a low rung, being ranked 45th, or 7th from the bottom. This is accounted for by the low quality of its nursing home services and its poor showing in terms of health outcomes, such as childhood immunizations and mental health care."

Florida

• "Florida’s Medicaid program is 4th in enrollment numbers and 5th in spending, and the state is under pressure to control both."

• "In terms of Eligibility, Florida [ranked 27th] earns points by covering individuals that have very high medical expenses but would otherwise have too much income to qualify. But it loses points for its restricted definition of who constitute the poor…"

• "The score for Scope of Services is only 51.8 percent of the total maximum, placing Florida in 35th place nationally."

• "In terms of Quality of Care, however, Florida ranks 4th.

• "In the Reimbursement category, Florida ranks 42nd."

Georgia

• "Georgia covers those whose higher-than standard income is offset by inordinate medical bills, and therefore gets additional points for both eligibility and scope of services. These points are not enough to compensate for deficiencies in other areas, though."

• "The score for Scope of Services is only 38.2 percent of the total maximum, and Georgia ranks 4th from the bottom (#48) in this category.

• "With respect to Quality of Care, the state Medicaid program ranks 42nd, largely by accruing negative points in nursing home care."

Kentucky

• "Like several other states, Kentucky is in the process of adopting a number of changes aimed at improving health status and controlling costs."

• "Kentucky’s Medicaid program ranks 20th overall but shows great variability in its ranks by category."

• "In terms of Eligibility, the program ranks 30th, largely because of its stringent income restrictions for some beneficiaries and its limitations in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)..."

• "The score for Scope of Services is 52.4 percent of the total value, placing Kentucky in the 34th rank."

• "The state, however, is among the top 10 scorers in the Quality of Care category. Kentucky’s program ranks 6th nationally, largely because of its creditable performance in staffing its nursing homes."

Louisiana

• "Louisiana’s Medicaid program was severely tested following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which devastated great swaths of the coastal areas and displaced hundreds of thousands of persons, many of whom were vulnerable and in need of health care. The hurricanes also destroyed part of the state’s medical infrastructure, especially in New Orleans, leading to the closure of several hospitals and the relocation of many health providers, including more than 3,000 physicians."

• "In terms of Eligibility, Louisiana ranks relatively high, #11, and receives 65.3 percent of the total value."

• "Quality of Care is by far the most deficient area. Here, Louisiana ranks 48th, a score that significantly lowers its overall rank. This reflects the state’s dismal performance in monitoring its nursing home services as well as the state’s poor rate of childhood immunizations."

Mississippi

• "Twenty years ago, Mississippi ranked last among all the Medicaid programs. The passage of time and the hurricane gusts of Katrina, alas, have not benefited the state, which once again ranks last."

• "The state ranks 49th in Eligibility. This reflects its restriction of services to those at the lowest mandated poverty level in most cases, leaving out many who cannot afford private health insurance, and its exclusion of those who are poor due to extreme health care costs, the medically needy."

• "The score for Scope of Services is the lowest in the nation…"

• "In terms of Quality of Care, it ranks 25th. This reflects a better-than-average performance in staffing and monitoring nursing care, indicators in which many other state programs are quite deficient."

North Carolina

• "The state ranks 24th with respect to Eligibility. It covers the medically needy and allows income levels higher than the mandated Federal Poverty Level requirement for some categories. However, it loses points for its scant State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) coverage."

• "The score for Scope of Services is a low 54.1 percent of the maximum total, placing the state in 32nd place."

• "In the Reimbursement category, however, the state ranks a respectable 12th. It matches the national average in its per capita spending…"

South Carolina

• "South Carolina’s rank of 44th reflects a Medicaid program that is extremely deficient in all areas except one, and ranks among the 10 worst in the country overall."

• "With respect to Eligibility, the state excludes those who are poor due to high medical expenses, the medically needy, and does not extend coverage above the mandated minimum Federal Poverty Level for the elderly, blind and disabled."

• "South Carolina’s rank for Scope of Services is 46th."

• "South Carolina not only provides shallow coverage for limited numbers of people, but it also fails in Quality of Care. It earns negative points in nursing home care, with scores that lower its relative rank in this category to 44th."

Tennessee

• "In 2005, the state announced a major overhaul, including drastic cuts that restricted eligibility and eliminated benefits to an estimated 170,000 TennCare enrollees. Since then, the state has proposed five programs intended to fill gaps in health coverage."

• "Although it loses points in the subcategories of women’s services, and devices and equipment, Tennessee does well in the other services. As a result, the state ranks 9th in Scope of Services."

• "Similarly, the state does well in Quality of Care, occupying the 11th rank nationwide."

[Note: Tennessee is omitted from the "Reimbursement" rankings and the overall rankings because it is the "only state that does not have a fee-for-service component" and therefore cannot be compared to other states.]

Texas

• "Placing in the bottom 10 in two categories, including the one with the heaviest weight, Texas ranks a poor 48th overall. In fact, it is the only state that places consistently at the bottom, all its category-specific ranks ranging within 10 ranks."

Virginia

• "Virginia’s Medicaid program shows much variation in how its stacks up by category, with ranks ranging from 9th to 42nd."

• Virginia places lowest in Eligibility, where it ranks 42nd. This poor performance is largely the result of low Federal Poverty Level caps for different populations, leaving those with slightly higher income without coverage, as well as the exclusion of some groups (e.g., tuberculosis patients, parents of children who are covered by SCHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program).

• "With respect to Quality of Care, however, Virginia ranks among the “Top 10,” placing 9th in this category. Compared with the rest of the states, Virginia does relatively well in indicators of nursing home care and childhood immunizations."

West Virginia

• "In Eligibility, the state ranks 34th, losing points for its strict adherence to the low mandated Federal Poverty Levels needed to qualify for services, which leaves some of the poor and near-poor without coverage."

• "In Scope of Services, it ranks 20th, with few noticeable exclusions except in devices and equipment."

• "It is under Reimbursement that West Virginia gets its best relative score: it ranks 12th. The state spends more per enrollee than the national average for the population groups included in our report."

The full report (PDF format) can be found here. There are extensive charts and graphs and tables of state rankings, and a detailed explanation of the methodology used to assign scores in each category and subcategory.

As the report notes, the quality and effectiveness of Medicaid programs varies widely from state to state. And this doesn't even begin to address the health care needs of 45 million uninsured in the U.S. As stated in the report's conclusion, "Each of the categories we have examined pose problems that require attention at the national level and cannot be solved on a state-by-state basis."

Labels: public health

Having been warned about stepping into the tempest that is the blogospheric discussion of the Duke lacrosse rape case, I can't say I'm surprised that my writing about it has drawn angry comments to Facing South. Though I don't plan to cover the case extensively going forward, there are some comments that I'd like to address before moving on.

One controversial aspect of my reporting has been my focus on the accuser's long history of serious mental problems. According to the latest revelations from the Raleigh News & Observer, unsealed records from UNC Healthcare contained in Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong's files show the woman was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was taking Depakote and Seroquel, drugs used to treat manic episodes associated with that disorder; Seroquel is also used to treat schizophrenia. Apparently, my pointing out these facts upsets the narrative of those who want to make the accuser out to be the villainous responsible party in the case.

But that narrative fails to hold up under scrutiny. Clearly, it was Nifong's responsibility to check out the credibility of his sole witness before dragging her, three criminally innocent men and the broader community through hell and back. He failed to do that and should be held to account.

The other controversial aspect of my reporting has been my effort to understand why some civil rights leaders were so inclined to believe the narrative offered by Nifong -- that of the poor black woman sexually abused by privileged white men. As I pointed out, there's a long and ugly history in the United States of sexualized violence being used in the service of white supremacy, in a way that has certain parallels with lynching. As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote in her essay "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence":

The association between lynching and rape appears most clearly in their parallel use in racial subordination. As Diane K. Lewis has pointed out, in a patriarchal society, black men, as men, constituted a potential challenge to the established order. Laws were formulated primarily to exclude black men from adult male prerogatives in the public sphere and lynching meshed with these legal mechanisms of exclusion. Black women represented a more ambiguous threat. They too were denied access to the politico-juridical domain, but since they shared this exclusion with women in general, its maintenance engendered less anxiety and required less force. Lynching served primarily to dramatize hierarchies among men. In contrast, the violence directed at black women illustrates the double jeopardy of race and sex. The records of the Freedmen's Bureau and the oral histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project testify to the sexual atrocities endured by black women as whites sought to reassert their command over the newly freed slaves. Black women were sometimes executed by lynch mobs, but more routinely they served as targets of sexual assault.

I noted that this sexualized violence directed against black women to uphold white supremacy continued well into the modern civil rights era, as discussed by historian Danielle L. McGuire in her essay "'It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African-American Freedom Struggle".

My reporting on this troubling aspect of U.S. history has sparked a particularly strong reaction from one Anonymous, who challenges these facts by asserting -- much as white supremacists once did in order to impose and uphold Jim Crow -- that today there's actually an epidemic of black men raping white women. As he wrote in one comment:

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) has shown, between 2001 and 2003, there were, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year, while whites averaged only 900 white-on-black rapes per year (a black-white ratio of 17.1:1). As Parker noted, the proportion of single-attacker white-on-black rape is so rare as to be statistically non-existent (less than one-half of one percent). ...Since there are five-and-one-half times as many whites as blacks in America, that means that blacks rape whites over ninety times as frequently as whites rape blacks. Except that the black-white interracial gap is actually much higher. The ‘white’ figure (900) is inflated by Hispanic offenders being counted as white. And no reliable statistics for interracial prison rape were included in the NCVS. Thus, the real black-white ratio is likely 200:1 or higher.

This data struck me as dubious, since I spent several years volunteering as a counselor in a rape crisis center at a large urban hospital and can't recall encountering any cases of interracial rape, let alone the sort of disparity Anonymous asserts. Since he didn't include citations for his claims, I did some checking, guessing that his post was drawn from another source. So I entered into a search engine the first bit of his comment -- "The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) has shown, between 2001 and 2003, there were, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year" -- to see what came up.

As it turns out, the passage comes from an article on the Duke case originally published on VDARE.com, a paleoconservative Web site that focuses on limiting immigration to the United States. The site is supported by the VDARE Foundation, created by former Forbes and National Review editor Peter Brimelow and named for the first English child born in the Americas. It used to be part of the Virginia-based Center for American Unity, which opposes "mass immigration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and affirmative action."

While VDARE offers articles on immigration policy by well-known commentators including Pat Buchanan and Michelle Malkin, it also publishes articles that veer into racist territory. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, VDARE contributor Steve Sailer argued (and outrageously enough quoted the Institute's Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch contributor Bill Quigley in doing so) that racial differences in intelligence were to blame for the fact that so many of the city's residents were unable to evacuate. Indeed, the Southern Poverty Law Center several years ago classed VDARE as a hate group:

Reviving a favorite theme of early nativists and the Ku Klux Klan, Brimelow attacks 19th-century Catholic immigrants for being supposedly subservient to popes and monarchs, and thus incompatible with democratic self-rule.

The VDARE Web site also contains an archive of columns by Sam Francis, the immigrant-bashing editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. In his columns, Francis rails against the "emerging Hispanic majority," plugs conspiracy theories, and promotes white racial consciousness.

In April, VDARE took one more step toward the racist right, publishing an essay on its Web site by white supremacist Jared Taylor that dismisses "the fantasy of racial equality," claims the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "stripped Americans of the right to make free decisions," and says that "[b]lacks, in particular, riot with little provocation,