How Natural Disasters Can Make The Gender Pay Gap Worse

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 1, 2012 at 6:10 pm

Damage estimates for Hurricane Sandy have crept up to about $50 billion, while economists are estimating that the storm could knock more than half a percentage point off of fourth-quarter economic growth. But other economic effects could also come to light.

As Sheila Bapat at RH Reality Check noted, research indicates that after Hurricane Katrina, women’s employment fell in New Orleans while the wage gap widened:

Hurricane Katrina is believed by some to have hurt New Orleans women’s economic status in the years that followed — specifically women’s workforce participation and the gender gap in wages. Tulane University’s Newcomb College Center for Research on Women published a report in December 2008 that primarily evaluates United States Census Bureau data from the two years following Katrina, showing that post-Katrina labor force participation rates dropped more for women than it did for men (-6.6 percent for females; -3.8 percent for males in 2007).

And a year after Hurricane Katrina, the average earnings of women of color declined as well. The Tulane report notes that “the median earnings of White, Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino men increased. In contrast, only the average earnings of White women showed a slight increase; the median earnings of Black/ African American women and Hispanic/Latinas fell.”

The Tulane report explains that barriers to women’s employment—including lack of schools, childcare facilities, housing and public transportation—magnified in post-storm New Orleans, and may have resulted in drops in both workforce participation and wages.

According to the Tulane report, labor shortages in the city should have created favorable wage conditions. However, women still lost ground:

Labor shortages in New Orleans following Katrina created a favorable bargaining position for workers to negotiate higher wages. However, these higher wages have not accrued to women workers whose wages on average increased by just 3.7 percent between 2005 and 2007. An inflation rate of 6.1 percent in the same time period basically eliminated any possible gain.10 Moreover, while the median earnings for all women increased slightly, the average earnings for White women dropped 5.2 percent, from $39,988 in 2005 to $37,916 in 2007, while the median earnings of Black/African American women dropped 3.3 percent, from $24,037 in 2005 to $23,240 in 2007.

Obviously, Hurricane Sandy was no Katrina. But populations that are already economically disadvantaged are more likely to lose ground due to a hurricane or other natural disaster, and Tulane’s report shows that women struggling to close the pay gap may be no exception.

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Justice

Ohio’s Ballot Woes Could Delay Election Results For Weeks

By Aviva Shen on Nov 1, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Pollsters and pundits have trained their eyes on Ohio, where President Obama maintains a narrow lead over Mitt Romney just days before the election. According to exit polls, Obama’s lead is even stronger among early voters. But several recent developments threaten to disenfranchise many of these voters and plunge Ohio into a bureaucratic nightmare on election night.

The Columbus Dispatch reported on Thursday that a data-sharing glitch and mistakes by election officials have caused thousands of absentee ballot requests to be rejected. While Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted maintains that this was a computer error, the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates found an abnormally high rate of rejected absentee ballot requests in Cuyahoga County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Cleveland. The Cuyahoga Board of Elections determined that 865 ballot requests had been erroneously thrown out. Though Cuyahoga sent notices to all affected voters, residents in other counties may not be aware and stand to be disenfranchised.

If these voters try to cast their vote in person, they will likely be forced to use a provisional ballot, as the absentee ballot error has thrown their registration status into question. At least 4,500 registered voters across the state will be left waiting for their absentee ballots, while as many as 6,000 provisional ballots cast by registered voters could be tossed out. The provisional ballots that do not get thrown out won’t be counted until November 17, according to state law, further dragging out the confusion.

This absentee ballot fiasco is just the latest in Ohio’s dysfunctional election saga. On Wednesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Husted to discount ballots cast by people directed to the wrong polling station by a pollworker — one of the most common errors that led to thousands of votes getting thrown out in Ohio’s dysfunctional 2004 presidential election.

Husted became a national symbol of voter suppression after he banned early voting on nights and weekends, and attempted to defy a court order that restored early voting on the last three days before the election.

In his defense, Husted often touts his unprecedented initiative to mail absentee ballot requests to every registered voter in the state. But critics have pointed out that this measure will probably add to the confusion that could delay the results of the election. Anyone who chooses to return the absentee ballot application but later decides to vote in person will be required to use a provisional ballot, as election officials need to verify that they did not also send in their absentee ballot. The absentee ballot initiative, then, could be a bureaucratic nightmare in disguise. With innumerable legitimate votes cast on provisional ballots, Ohio’s 2012 election could end up mirroring 2004, when the state discarded thousands of votes and tipped George W. Bush over the edge to victory by the narrowest margin.

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Health

Massachusetts Approves Tighter Regulations To Help Prevent Future Meningitis Outbreaks

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Nov 1, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Tainted compounded drugs that led to a deadly meningitis outbreak

Since the recent outbreak of a deadly strain of fungal meningitis was traced to contaminated steroid shots produced in a Massachusetts-area compounded pharmacy, Massachusetts officials have been cracking down on the largely unregulated compounded drug industry. And earlier today, the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy approved new, tighter rules for compounding pharmacies that will — for the first time in the state’s history — empower state officials to track compounded drugs and help prevent future public health crises.

The new regulations allow the state to penalize compounding pharmacies whose products fail to comply with safety standards, giving the pharmacy board power to quarantine compounded drugs they suspect to be unsafe — such as the tainted steroid shots, which ended up exposing thousands of Americans to meningitis and killing nearly 30 people — without waiting to hold a hearing first. The Boston Globe reports that Massachusetts’ efforts to tighten regulations in the pharmaceutical industry are also being replicated on a national level, now that the meningitis outbreak has brought more attention to the lack of regulatory power over compounded pharmacies and their potentially dangerous products:

At the same time, Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey unveiled federal legislation Thursday to address what he called a “regulatory black hole” currently governing these pharmacies by giving the FDA new oversight authority. [...]
“No one should live in fear that their medicine is unsafe, and these actions at the state and federal level will help ensure we’re at the forefront of efforts to protect public health,” interim state public health commissioner Dr. Lauren Smith said in a statement.

The Department of Public Health also announced Thursday that Christian A. Hartman, a specialist in pharmacy practice and patient safety, would chair a new Special Commission that will study potential changes to laws and regulations to fill the regulatory gray area between state and federal oversight.

Over 20,000 U.S. pharmacies across the country practice compounding, which involves repackaging or recombining medications in an attempt to keep down the costs of filling prescriptions. However, despite the widespread practice, the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t been able to oversee this sector of the pharmaceutical industry because it doesn’t have the power to regulate pharmacies — which means that compounded drugs do not have to meet the agency’s safety guidelines. Public health advocates have been calling on Congress to strengthen the FDA’s regulatory power to prevent future outbreaks, and Massachusetts’ new regulations are a step in the right direction to correcting the situation that allowed meningitis to spread in the first place.

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NEWS FLASH

Montana GOP Candidate Gives Up Scheme To Evade Contribution Limits | A Montana district judge on Wednesday extended her order blocking former Rep. Rick Hill, the Republican nominee for governor, from spending an over-the-legal-limit $500,000 contribution from the state party. The party made the contribution during a brief window between a federal judge throwing out all of the state’s campaign finance limits and an appeals court staying that ruling. Hill’s campaign said it does not plan to appeal Wednesday’s ruling and will abide by it.

Health

How Obamacare Will Help Low-Wage Workers Afford Their Health Coverage

By Sy Mukherjee on Nov 1, 2012 at 4:45 pm

The Commonwealth Fund is out with a new study that highlights how Obamacare will help the low-income wage earners — who typically have significantly less access to health insurance than their higher-paid co-workers, or the employees who work in larger firms — afford the critical health coverage they need.

Contrary to unfounded conservative hysteria about the health reform law’s negative impact on the economy, Obamacare actually lowers health care spending in small firms while giving employers a viable avenue for insuring their employees. And the Commonwealth report further illustrates Obamacare’s potential to greatly reduce the percentage of low-wage workers going without health coverage. Currently, over half of workers making less than $15 per hour at businesses with less than 50 employees are either currently uninsured or have been uninsured in the past several years:

These workers do not qualify for employer-sponsored health insurance — either because their employer does not offer health benefits or because they work part-time — and although their hourly wages surpass current Medicaid eligibility thresholds, they don’t make enough to afford insurance on the private market. This dynamic leaves low-wage workers both uninsured and unable to afford their essential medical costs. Luckily, the study finds that Obamacare provisions will go a long way toward ensuring low-wage workers have affordable coverage, particularly thanks to the incentives that encourage small businesses to provide their employees with coverage and the Medicaid expansion to cover more low-income Americans who were previously above the income threshold.

The report concludes that by 2014, Obamacare’s statewide exchanges will provide subsidized insurance in one form or another to a full 50 percent of the 27.6 million American workers who are currently uninsured. The Medicaid expansion — if GOP governors choose to participate it in it rather than continuing to deny coverage to their low-income constituents — will provide insurance to an additional 37 percent of uninsured workers.

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NEWS FLASH

STUDY: Bullying Increases High School Dropout Rates | A new study from the Unviersity of Virginia found that the prevalence of teasing and bullying in schools directly increases high school dropout rates, independent of factors like socioeconomic status and academic performance. The study followed 7,082 students over their four years of high school as well as 2,764 teachers in Virginia from 2007-2011. Schools with high rates of bullying had dropout rate 29 percent above average, whereas schools with low levels of bullying had dropout rates 28 percent below average. UVA professor Dewey Cornell points out that the study is the latest piece of evidence that an inclusive school climate is vital to student success.

Security

Report Debunks Claim That The Obama Administration Disenfranchised Military Voters

By Hamed Aleaziz on Nov 1, 2012 at 4:23 pm

Military members abroad have requested fewer absentee ballots this year. The figure is determined by the number of people that downloaded an application for the ballot and registration request. Conservatives, led by Fox News, have been blowing the decline out of proportion, in some cases implying that the Obama administration is responsible. However, an article published today in Stars and Stripes, which first reported on the drop, explains the decline with a few innocuous factors: fewer troops abroad, voter apathy, more voting options, and ballots that are no longer being sent to old addresses.

In October, in a segment on the decrease in requested ballots from absentee military voters, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy said “some are saying, well, are they trying to disenfranchise the military? We don’t know.” Roger Hedgecock, a conservative radio host and former mayor of San Diego, made a similar charge on Bill Maher’s Real Time show in September. On more than one occasion, Fox News covered a report by the Military Voter Protection Project (MVPP) on the dramatic decrease in ballot requests and added commentary, saying, “This data should sound an immediate warning bell for military voters.” The MVPP report blamed the government’s inability to quickly set up registration offices.

Republicans also commented on the decline. “This is an unacceptable failure by Pentagon leaders to comply with the law and ensure our service members and their families are able to exercise one of the most fundamental rights for which they sacrifice every day,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said.

However, Michael P. Mcdonald, a voting behavior expert and a professor at George Mason University, told Stars and Stripes that MVPP’s report is “poorly sourced,” adding, “It has no credibility and should be treated as such.”

The Federal Voting Assistance Program also debunked MPVV’s report. “The reason there’s a lower number of ballots being transmitted is exclusively the issue of no longer automatically transmitting ballots [to addresses] from prior election cycles,” former FVAP head Bob Carey told Stars and Stripes. What’s more, Carey said, since the MOVE Act, a law that created new voting offices for absentee military voters, passed in 2009, voting access has actually increased for military voters abroad:

“There were no installation voting assistance offices in 2008. There are in 2012. But voter numbers have gone down in 2012, and it’s because the services are not doing the installation voting assistance offices well enough. You can see the fundamental problem with the logic here.”

The reduction in requested absentee ballots can be explained by other factors as well: voter apathy, a decreased number of troops stationed abroad, and the fact that military members might be accessing absentee ballots differently than in the past, with new options like “voting assistance officers and election websites run by the state” rather than making the requests individually. For its part, MVPP told Stars and Stripes that it does not blame the Obama administration for the drop.

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Justice

Nine Democratic Senate Candidates Endorse Filibuster Reform

By Ian Millhiser on Nov 1, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Nine Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate — Tammy Baldwin (WI), Rich Carmona (AZ), Martin Heinrich (NM), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Mazie Hirono (HI), Tim Kaine (VA), Bob Kerrey (NE), Chris Murphy (CT) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) — all committed to “fix the broken Senate by reforming the filibuster” according to a fundraising pitch on their behalf by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), increasing the likelihood that the Senate will finally fix its deeply broken rules when it reconvenes with its new members this January.

Although it is unclear just what package of reforms will be on the table in January, Merkley is the leading proponent of an eight part rules reform plan that is likely to be among the leading contenders. Although many prongs of Merkley’s plan are rather modest, his most significant proposal requires a gradually escalating group of senators to be physically present on the Senate floor in order to maintain a filibuster:

The public believes that filibustering senators have to hold the floor. Indeed, the public perceives the filibuster as an act of principled public courage and sacrifice. Let’s make it so.

Require a specific number of Senators — I suggest five for the first 24 hours, 10 for the second 24 hours, and 20 thereafter — to be on the floor to sustain the filibuster. This would be required even during quorum calls. At any point, a member could call for a count of the senators on the floor who stand in opposition to the regular order, and if the count falls below the required level, the regular order prevails and a majority vote is held.

Because Merkley’s plan imposes a physical cost on senators who filibuster, it would go a long way towards eliminating the kind of widespread obstructionism that dominated the last four years. Currently, just a handful of senators can bring the Senate to a standstill by objecting to each bill or nomination that comes before the body. Then the burden falls on the majority to come up with 60 votes to break the filibuster — and even if they do, the obstructionists can still force up to 30 hours of needless delay afterwards.

The Merkley plan will not eliminate all of this needless delay. Nor will it prevent a truly determined minority from blocking a high priority item that they care a great deal about. But it will go a long way towards preventing just a small group of senators from blocking routine bills and confirmations.

When the new senators are sworn in next January, a brief window opens up when a bare majority of the Senate can reform the filibuster or eliminate it entirely.

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Economy

Banks Pour Money Into Coffers Of Likely GOP Financial Services Committee Chairman

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 1, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)

Current House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer “serve the banks” Bachus (R-AL) will have to give up his gavel in the next Congress due to committee term limits. His likely replacement is Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX).

Acknowledging that Hensarling will hold the reins, banks and other financial firms are pouring money into his campaign coffers, despite the extremely safe Republican district in which he is running:

Campaign money has flowed Hensarling’s way, much of it from insurance companies, securities brokers, investment firms and banks. Together, employees of those industries or their political action committees have donated $630,447 to his campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Hensarling’s fundraising haul this year is 66 percent more than he received in 2010, when Republicans surged to win control of the House. [...]
Separately, Hensarling has raised $967,421 for his political action committee, another source of money to donate to Republicans. JPMorgan Chase is the largest source of donations to Hensarling’s leadership PAC. Other major donors include hedge fund Mason Capital Management and Bank of America.

The financial sector is far and away Hensarling’s largest contributor, giving him $1.6 million overall in this cycle alone. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, his next largest set of contributors — “miscellaneous business” — gave him $232,000.

As Financial Services Committee Chairman, Hensarling can be expected to continue the House Republican assault on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Hensarling was a staunch opponent of Dodd-Frank when the law was being debated, and particularly the law’s creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also called a tax on big banks “frankly lunacy.” Now he is poised to be the big banks’ top man on the Financial Services Committee as it attempts to cripple Dodd-Frank.

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Alyssa

What ‘Star Wars Episode VII’ Should Keep In Mind For Its New Story

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm

Contra my hope that Disney’s announced Star Wars Episode VII would draw storylines from the Expanded Universe—I’ll just have to hope for a Rogue Squadron television show, someday—it sounds like Disney’s going to start from scratch. As E Online reports, “‘It’s an original story,’ a LucasFilm source tells me. In other words, forget the Star Wars novels. Forget the graphic novels. Forget everything you think you know about what happens to Luke Skywalker. According to my sources, Episode 7 will literally be nothing you’ve ever seen or read before from the Star Wars universe.” The Guide To The Star Wars Universe stone-cold nerd in me will admit to being somewhat disappointed (though I still don’t think this means they scrap the continuity for sure—it could just mean they spin out to a different era or part of the galaxy). But I still think it’s worth thinking about what made both Star Wars and the Expanded Universe so addictive, and what could distinguish this franchise from the other ones in play in the media landscape.

One possibility, which I wrote about in Slate today, is that the franchise could jump ahead of its competitors by focusing on the female characters that have always been one of its strengths: Read more

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