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Governor Can’t Find A Single Latino In Pennsylvania To Work For Him

Economy

Congressman’s Misuse Of Bible Verse Belies Bad Theology And Ideology On Food Stamps

By Jack Jenkins, Guest Blogger posted from ThinkProgress Economy on May 23, 2013 at 12:00 pm

As the House Agriculture Committee convened earlier this week to discuss whether or not to cut as much as $4.1 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), the conversation between lawmakers devolved into an exchange that was equal parts bad policy and bad theology.

As House members discussed slashing the budget for the Farm Bill, which funds SNAP, Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) took issue with some Democrats who cited Jesus Christ’s call to care for “the least of these” when describing the government’s need to assist the hungry. Instead, Fincher explained that his support for the proposed cuts by quoting a very different Bible verse – 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

But while the use of 2 Thessalonians is a convenient tool for those who want to justify ignoring the poor, Fincher’s lukewarm Biblical argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. As many religious bloggers have already pointed out, the author of 2 Thessalonians was actually referring to ancient Christians who had stopped working in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. The verse is concerned with correcting a theological misunderstanding (i.e., don’t just wait around for Jesus, live an active faith), not passing judgement on the poor.

Worse still, Fincher’s use of the Bible to defend the slashing of food stamps isn’t just bad theology, it’s also bad policy.

Undergirding Fincher’s sloppy exegesis is an old conservative fiction that people who rely on food stamps are lazy parasites who mooch off the government and refuse to work. In reality, most of the country’s 47 million food stamp recipients are children or the elderly, and many are employed. A 2012 report from the USDA found that 45 percent of SNAP recipients were under 18 years of age, nearly 9 percent were age 60 or older, and more than 40 percent lived in households with earnings.

Fincher’s misguided Bible-thumping ignores the plight of America’s 8.9 million “working poor.” This massive group includes the thousands of participants from the recent fast food and retail workers strikes, people who, despite working full-time 40 hours a week for booming industries, often only make around $7.25 an hour, or $15,000 a year. That’s far below the federal poverty threshold of $23,550 for a family of four and leaves many working families with no choice but to apply for food stamps just to feed their loved ones. The strikers, who are consistently backed by droves of religious leaders, are clearly willing to work, yet lawmakers like Fincher (who made his millions with the help of government farm subsidies) stand poised to deny them access to the food they need by decimating funding for SNAP.

Fincher’s misuse of scripture is also a slight to disabled Americans who rely on SNAP to stay afloat. Americans with disabilities, many of whom are elderly or military veterans, are burdened with any number of maladies that make full-time work difficult, if not impossible. Far from encouraging freeloading behavior, food stamps and programs like Meals on Wheels help us honor our national commitment — and, for many Americans, a religious duty — to assist our fellow citizens when they need us most.

Fincher is free to draw his own conclusions about the Bible and its teachings. But using scripture to accuse millions of Americans of being lazy freeloaders is not only spiritually bankrupt, it’s also politically stupid. SNAP and other programs that help the poor still face the potential for massive cuts as versions of the Farm Bill move through Congress in the coming weeks, but millions of struggling Americans are hoping that elected officials will spend less time concocting dehumanizing theology and more time creating policies that grant much-needed assistance to our country’s most vulnerable.

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, a Senior Writer and Researcher with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative.

Economy

Shoddy Materials And Illegal Construction Caused Bangladesh Factory Collapse

By Bryce Covert posted from ThinkProgress Economy on May 23, 2013 at 10:50 am

Photo via the AP

The Bangladesh government released results of its investigation into the factory collapse that killed 1,127 and concluded that “extremely” poor quality materials and violations of regulations were to blame, the Associated Press reports:

The report found that building owner Sohel Rana had permission to build a six-story structure and added two floors illegally so he could rent them out to garment factories. Past statements from authorities said the owner had permission for a five-story structure and added three floors illegally.

The report also said the building was not built for industrial use and the weight of the heavy garment factory machinery and their vibrations contributed to the building collapse. Those factors had previously been cited.

The ground on which the building was built was not fit for a multi-story building, the report said.

The investigation committee has recommended that Rana and the owners of the factories be sentenced to life in jail if they are found guilty.

There are more signs of shoddy construction in other Bangladesh factories, though. Cracks were spotted on the walls of another factory in Gazipur, near Dhaka, that is still operating and making clothing, including Wrangler shirts, for North Carolina-based Liz Apparels. Walmart has stopped using the factory because it is on the company’s “red” list after its own audit found cracks. Inspectors for Inditex, owner of Zara, also saw cracks, and Reuters Television found a vertical crack running up a wall that appeared to have been recently plastered over.

Even in the face of these concerns, some major American companies have continued their opposition to signing a broad safety agreement that would upgrade Bangladesh facilities and was signed by six large European retailers. When some shareholders questioned Gap’s refusal at its recent annual meeting, CEO Glenn Murphy voiced his concerns: “In the United States, there’s maybe a bigger legal risk than there is in Europe.” While the company is still in support of a global agreement in theory, the current one does not “make sense” for the company, he said.

Walmart and Target have also declined to sign the agreement, citing similar concerns. American companies Abercrombie & Fitch and PVH, owner of Calvin Klein, Izod, and Tommy Hilfiger have signed on.

While cost has also been raised as a concern for both companies and consumers, upgrades to Bangladesh’s factories could cost consumers as little as 10 cents per garment if all of the costs were passed on.

Media

MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ Slams GOP Chair For Insinuating Obama Is Involved In IRS Scandal

By Annie-Rose Strasser on May 23, 2013 at 9:56 am

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday morning, panelist John Heilemann got into a heated argument with GOP Chairman Reince Priebus over President Obama’s role in the targeting of conservative groups applying for 501(c)4 status. Priebus offered a series of comments trying to tie Obama to the scandal — which Republicans have attempted to frame the IRS scandal as Obama’s ‘Watergate’ moment — leading Heilemann to shout “that’s an assertion that’s not actually borne out by any of the facts”:

HEILEMANN: Okay. You used two phrases just now saying we have to wait for the facts but I’m entitled to my opinion and before we have the facts just wait. You then said it’s lawlessness and guerrilla warfare and Obama is in the middle of. You say we need to have all of the facts before we can determine whether President Obama is in the middle of it and now you’re asserting the fact he’s in the middle of it. That is your public tweet.

PRIEBUS: I would say it is consistent. When I start out an investigation and say it’s low level employees in Cincinnati and then you find out there are senior level people in Washington. Then Pfeiffer goes on five Sunday morning shows and says the White House didn’t know anything about this and two days later you figure out that the chief of staff actually knew about it. You have a hundred and, what? 15 visits from Shulman to the White House and 132 Democratic senators pleading with the IRS to investigate this. And the Chief of Staff of the White House is now involved or at least knew about it when — two days earlier Pfeiffer said they didn’t know about it.

HEILEMANN: I thought you said you have the facts you need. If you don’t have the facts you need why are you saying he’s in the middle of it?

Watch it:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has also tried to tie Obama’s name to the IRS scandal, though unsuccessfully. An Investigator General’s report on the case found no indication that the targeting of certain 501(c)4 groups was part of a larger political strategy.

Health

Senator Compares Obama Cabinet Official To Convicted Felon Oliver North

By Igor Volsky posted from ThinkProgress Health on May 23, 2013 at 9:00 am

A top Senate Republican is comparing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to convicted felon Oliver North for soliciting private donations to help implement the Affordable Care Act.

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) charged that Sebelius circumvented Congress’ refusal to provide funds for the administration’s health care law by raising those dollars from outside groups, just as “Col. North was accused of using money raised in an arms-for-hostages swap with Iran to fund and work with private organizations providing military support to rebel armies in Nicaragua.”

In 1987, North admitted that he lied to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal — in which officials secretly sold arms to Iran to fund a resistance movement to the government in Nicaragua — and shred documents to cover-up the government’s actions. He was indicted on 16 counts and convicted of three: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and ordering the destruction of documents.

“With Iran-Contra, Congress had also prohibited support for the rebels, while in the case of health-care funding, Congress has refused to provide the amounts that the administration has asked for,” Alexander wrote. “But the principle and the legal prohibitions are the same.” Republican chairmen and ranking Republicans on five congressional committees have asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the matter.

Obama administration officials insist that Sebelius was following authority laid out in the Public Health Service Act — which allows the secretary to “support by grant or contract (and to encourage others to support) private nonprofit entities working in health information and health promotion, preventive health services, and education in the appropriate use of health care” — but “has made no fundraising requests to entities regulated by HHS.” The New York Times reported on May 12 that Sebelius did solicit donations from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and H&R Block.

Indeed, asking private organizations to contribute to administration causes is old practice in Washington, as Alexander himself knows.

In 1991, while serving as Secretary of Education for President George H. W. Bush, Alexander actively and enthusiastically sought private dollars to fund the administration’s education initiative, America 2000. Alexander crisscrossed the country to sell the program after Congress failed to approve Bush’s education funding request.

As he explained in a San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed on Sep. 27, 1992, “President Bush asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to redesign such new American schools. Congress balked, the business community didn’t. The president has asked American businesses to raise $200 million to fund design teams to help communities create such schools.”

Bush made the fundraising pitch in the Rose Garden in July of 1991 during an event with private donors, with Alexander standing by his side. “Funds are pouring in — I don’t want to say ‘pouring,’ because we’re going to put the arm on you all on in a minute here — but funds are coming in well,” the president said. “[A]lready $30 million has been raised, much of it from the corporations that are represented here today.”
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Justice

The Inside Story Of The Harvard Dissertation That Became Too Racist For Heritage

By Zack Beauchamp posted from ThinkProgress Justice on May 22, 2013 at 7:30 pm

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.

Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic debates on the same basic concepts.

The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites,” has proved proper tinder for a public firestorm. The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies is now a former Senior Policy Analyst — Heritage could not risk further tainting an immigration report it hoped would be influential by outright defending its scholar’s meditations on the possibly genetic intellectual inferiority of immigrants from Latin America.

It might seem like the book is closed on l’affaire Richwine: he’s left his job, Heritage is left with a black eye, and not a single mind has been changed about the value of research into race and IQ. But there’s still one major unanswered question.

If the dissertation was bad enough to get him fired from the Heritage Foundation, how did it earn him a degree from Harvard?

A popular answer among Richwine’s defenders is that, quite simply, it was exemplary work. Richwine’s dissertation committee was made up, by all accounts, of three eminent scholars, each widely respected in their respective fields. And it is Harvard.

But dozens of interviews with subject matter experts, Harvard graduates in Richwine’s program who overlapped with him, and members of the committee itself paint a somewhat more textured picture. Richwine’s dissertation was sloppy scholarship, relying on statistical sophistication to hide some serious conceptual errors. Yet internal accounts of Richwine’s time at Harvard suggests the august university, for the most part, let serious problems in Richwine’s research  fall through the cracks.

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Security

Obama Administration Completes Counterterrorism ‘Playbook’

By Hayes Brown posted from ThinkProgress Security on May 22, 2013 at 6:34 pm

(Credit: Getty)

In a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that a set of rules codifying the administration’s counterterrorism policies, including its targeted killing program, have been completed and President Obama has approved it.

The letter also confirms for the first time that the United States killed four American citizens in drone strikes since President Obama took office in 2009.

But the completion of the Obama administration’s codification of how it conducts targeted killings and other counterterrorism policies — or the “playbook” as it has been called — has much further reaching implications for future U.S. policy. Begun as a project of then-White House Counterterrorism Director John Brennan, and accelerated due to fears of Obama not serving a second term, the playbook was meant to put into writing many of the ad hoc processes the administration had developed to facilitate the targeted killing of suspected terrorists.

A Washington Post article on Brennan from 2012 revealed that the playbook is meant to “cover the selection and approval of targets from the ‘disposition matrix,’ the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted, and the legal authorities the administration thinks sanction its actions in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.” The “disposition matrix” is the benign-sounding name for the process used to approve targets for strikes. Far from being limited to drones, these strikes include the use of missiles fired from Naval warships and manned aircraft, and special operations forces.

According to Holder’s letter to Congressional leaders, the playbook has been completed, though it won’t be available to the public anytime soon:

This week the President approved and relevant congressional committees will be notified and briefed on a document that institutionalizes the Administration’s exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities; these standards and processes are already in place or are to be transitioned into place. While that document remains classified, it makes clear that a cornerstone of the Administration’s policy is one of the principles I noted in my speech at Northwester: that lethal force should not be used when it is feasible to capture a terrorist suspect.

Among the changes rumored to be put into place in the playbook is the shifting of authority for agencies to use drones in carrying out lethal strikes. Reports indicate that while the CIA will retain control of the drone program in Pakistan, other theaters will see drones placed under the sole purview of the Department of Defense.

Despite the increased attention they’ve received, the number of drone strikes has reportedly dropped in recent years. President Obama is due to deliver a speech on Thursday at the National Defense University laying out his vision for how counterterrorism goals will be pursued in the second term, including the use of drones and the closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Alyssa

Why Binge-Watching Is Netflix’s Creative Killer App—But One With Downsides

By Alyssa Rosenberg posted from ThinkProgress Alyssa on May 22, 2013 at 5:47 pm

The Hollywood Reporter has a long interview with Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, and Cindy Holland, who is the company’s vice president for original programming. And one of the things that it makes clear is that, in addition to the company’s willingness to spend a lot of money—as Sarandos puts it, “I felt like what [a network like] Starz was doing earlier on [during the Party Down era] was just kind of putting their toe in the water and doing a lot of “see what sticks” and not spending too much money. For us, I wanted to know that if it didn’t work, it was because it was a bad idea.”—the real killer app for Netflix, as it’s pitching to creators and to audiences, is what you can do with narrative storytelling when viewers are watching a show like a novel, at a pace that they want, in a break with traditional week-by-week episode programming.

Holland argued that releasing all of the episodes of a show at once frees Netflix’s programming both from the traditional structure of a television episode that’s designed to get audiences to return the next week—and from some of the way the conversation around television functions, something that writers have mourned, but that it’s unclear yet if fans miss. “Part of the conversation early on is thinking about it as a 13-hour movie,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t need recaps. We don’t need cliff-hangers at the end. You can write differently knowing that in all likelihood the next episode is going to be viewed right away.” When I spoke to Kevin Spacey about why he and David Fincher decided that Netflix was the right home for House of Cards, he cited that structural freedom—particularly from the constraints of shooting a more conventional pilot—as one of the reasons they chose Netflix as a partner.

Sarandos gave a specific example in genre fiction, particularly the show that Netflix is developing with the Wachowskis. “Sense8,” he said, “is a genre that we were looking for, adult contemporary sci-fi, and done in a way that’s very difficult to do for television, both because of budget constraints and because sci-fi storytelling tends to be very complex. Because of our ‘watch them all at once’ mentality, we were able to allow them to create a dense and complicated world.” I imagine that’s a lesson Netflix has learned from the example of Game of Thrones, which relies on an immensely complex web of characters, plot lines, and concepts that aren’t always revisited from week to week, leaving viewers reliant on their friends or online concordances to keep everything straight. Binge-watching lets viewers be reminded of characters and genre concepts regularly, rather than trying to hold onto them over an entire week until the next installment.

I’m happy to hear Sarandos talking about the creatively liberating aspects of his business model, as well as to say things like: “I want it to be the exact number of episodes you need to tell the story perfectly. It’s very difficult to sustain a show beyond three years. Characters start to fall apart, and your writers turn over. Some of the other conventions that I’m happy to dismiss: How long does the episode have to be? And how many episodes does the season have to be?” But I do think the company has to be wary of some of the creative downsides of binge-watching for its writers as well.

One of the things that makes television unique, and that poses a useful challenge to writers is precisely that the medium, as conventionally aired, requires that the staff of a show create content that can hold up under a week’s consideration, and that convinces viewers to come back. Shows that are designed for binge-watching may fall under the latter constraint, because unless you’re a television critic or someone with a very inactive social life, there are a limited number of people who can watch thirteen episodes of a drama in one sitting.
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Economy

Average CEO Salary Reached A New Record High Of $9.7 Million In 2012

By Aviva Shen posted from ThinkProgress Economy on May 22, 2013 at 5:00 pm

The average CEO salary broke records in 2011 at $9.6 million — and now, that record high has been topped by 2012 salaries, which averaged out to $9.7 million. Health care and media CEOs enjoyed the highest pay, while utility CEOs had the lowest at $7.5 million. Sixty percent of CEOs got a raise last year.

Though CEO pay dropped slightly after the financial crisis, it quickly rebounded to reach new heights in 2010, 2011, and now 2012. Simultaneously, the pay gap between CEOs and workers has also broken records, as the average CEO in 2012 earned 354 times more than the average worker.

During the recession, some companies changed their compensation formulas to incorporate more stock as a way to tie executives’ salaries to the company’s performance. As the stock market enjoys all-time highs, CEO pay has also soared. Yet the stock market’s rally has not been felt by most middle and low income families, as the housing market recovers in fits and starts. As a result, income inequality has been exacerbated in the first two years of the recovery.

Skyrocketing executive salaries since deregulation in the 1980s helped the top 1 percent of Americans expand their share of income, even as worker pay has stagnated.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law tried to address this phenomenon by ordering public companies to reveal the exact disparity between their CEO and worker pay. Three years later, many big businesses are lobbying to kill the requirement in the rule-making process. Transparent payrolls can help keep executive compensation within the stratosphere and help investors get a sense of employee morale and company reputation. Even so, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon compared efforts to tamp down executive pay to Communist Cuba. Whole Foods, which tracks pay to ensure that no employee makes more than 19 times the median company salary, has dismissed claims that the rule burdens businesses, noting it only takes a few days to track.

Skewed executive compensation levels made some CEOs iconic villains after the financial crisis. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit got a $6.7 million pay-out after driving the bank to near ruin, while a Duke Energy CEO received $44 million for one day of work.

Climate Progress

Bombshell: China May Be Close To Implementing A Cap On Carbon Pollution

By Katie Valentine posted from Climate Progress on May 22, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Credit: Associated Press

China is taking steps to tackle its huge carbon output. Today, the country announced the details of its first carbon trading program, which will begin in the city of Shenzhen next month. The southern city is one of seven cities and provinces, including Beijing, which will take part in the pilot program, set to be completely implemented by 2014.

And according to one local news source, China could implement an absolute, nation-wide cap on its carbon emissions by 2016. China’s 21st Century Business Herald reported this week that the country’s State Council still needs to approve the carbon cap proposal submitted by the National Development and Reform Commission, a government entity that controls much of the Chinese economy. The proposal, which the State Council is reportedly likely to support, would ensure China’s emissions would not increase past the country’s target cap, regardless of economic growth — though it’s still unclear what that cap would be. The paper reported that the NDRC also predicts China’s greenhouse gas emissions will peak in 2025, rather than 2030, as earlier predictions stated.

If the cap is adopted, it would be a major step for the world’s top CO2 emitter, which desperately needs to slow its carbon production. China is experiencing the world’s fastest growth in energy production and CO2 emissions, while production and emissions in the U.S. and Europe are flat-lining or decreasing. China uses 47 percent of the world’s coal, a number that’s only going up: in 2011, China’s coal consumption grew by 9 percent, accounting for 87 percent of the world’s 374 million ton increase in coal consumption that year.

The country’s emissions aren’t just a major contributor to climate change worldwide — they’re causing serious local problems as well. In Beijing, pollution has reached record levels, topping 775 in January — a number that breaks the Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality scale of 0 to 500. The air pollution levels are so high that Beijing schools are building air-purified domes over playgrounds so that children can play outside, and many expatriates are withdrawing their applications from Beijing jobs or choosing to leave the country altogether.

The possibility of a carbon cap in China has been hailed as “potentially transformative” in the fight against climate change, as other major emitters such as the U.S. have historically cited China’s inaction on climate change as reason to avoid implementing meaningful greenhouse gas regulations. Previously, China has shied away from cuts in emissions, saying its main priority was the growth of its economy. In November 2012, the state-owned Xinhua quoted Xie Zhenhua, China’s chief negotiator to the UN climate change talks, as saying it was “unfair and unreasonable to hold China to absolute cuts in emissions at the present stage, when its per capita GDP stands at just 5,000 U.S. dollars.”
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Health

Health Care For A Family Of Four Now Costs More Than The Groceries To Feed Them For An Entire Year

By Tara Culp-Ressler posted from ThinkProgress Health on May 22, 2013 at 2:58 pm

As medical costs continue to rise, the annual health expenses for a family of four now exceed the typical of cost of their groceries during the same time period, according to a new report from consulting firm Milliman, Inc.

The firm estimates that a typical family of four with an employer-sponsored health plan will end up incurring about $22,030 for all of their medical costs in 2013. That represents a 6.3 increase from last year, when the typical family racked up $20,728.

Some of that total sum ends up being covered by the family’s health insurance plan — the firm’s analysts found that employers paid about 58 percent of the total health care costs — but a big chunk of it falls onto the family itself. The average family pays more than $9,000 in payroll deductions and out-of-pocket bills for their health care, which is more than they typically spend on groceries and gas for an entire year:

“It is a huge expense,” Chris Girod, principal and consulting actuary at Milliman Inc. said in an interview. “Although the trends are slowing down, the total dollar amount has risen $1,300 per year each of the last four years.”

Meanwhile, the share a family and employees pay continues to rise as employers push more costs onto their workers. Therefore, the total share of the overall costs continues to mount, surpassing other household milestones like food and a year’s worth of gas.

“The total share of this cost borne directly by the family — $9,144 in payroll deductions and out-of-pocket costs — now exceeds the cost of groceries for the (Milliman Medical Index’s) typical family of four,” the study says. “The out-of-pocket cost alone — $3,600 for co-pays, coinsurance and other cost sharing, is more than the average U.S. household spends on gas in a year.”

That’s been a consistent trend over the past several years. As the cost of health care increases, Americans’ contributions to their health plans have risen at a much faster rate than their employers’ share. Since 2003, workers in every single state have had to increase their contributions to their family health plans by nearly 75 percent. At the same time, workers’ wages have stagnated. As struggling Americans aren’t able to afford the treatment they need, they’re putting off doctor’s visits and skipping out on their medication.

And, if the regular health costs that a typical American family incurs over the course of the year already represent such a big expense, it’s easy to see how just one catastrophic medical event could plunge Americans into serious debt. The average trip to an emergency room costs 40 percent more than what most Americans spend on monthly rent. It’s even worse for those with ongoing conditions that need expensive treatment — for instance, the Americans who are battling cancer are twice as likely to go bankrupt, even if they have health insurance.

Health

Activists Pressure Companies To Boycott Facebook Over Its Content Promoting Violence Against Women

By Tara Culp-Ressler posted from ThinkProgress Health on May 22, 2013 at 1:55 pm

An example of the content that regularly appears on Facebook promoting violence against women

A coalition of sexual violence prevention and women’s equality organizations are joining forces to pressure Facebook to take a stand against any messages that “trivialize or glorify” violence against women, which they say the company should recognize as gender-based hate speech. The activist groups — led by Women, Action & the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project, and author Soraya Chemaly — are asking Facebook to commit to removing this type of content from its platform. And until it does, they’re telling companies to pull their advertising from the site.

In an open letter to the organization, the groups point out that Facebook’s content moderators already police some images of women. In fact, images of mastectomies, breastfeeding mothers, and other non-sexualized depictions of women’s bodies are often removed from the site after being incorrectly labeled as pornographic. On the other hand, however, images and forums that make light of abusing and raping women are allowed to remain on the social media platform under the “humor” section of their content guidelines.

“It appears that Facebook considers violence against women to be less offensive than non-violent images of women’s bodies, and that the only acceptable representation of women’s nudity are those in which women appear as sex objects or the victims of abuse,” the groups’ open letter reads. “Your common practice of allowing this content by appending a [humor] disclaimer to said content literally treats violence targeting women as a joke.”

Facebook currently allows pages on its site called “Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus,” “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs,” “This is why Indian girls are raped,” and “Punching your girlfriend in the face cuz you’re Chris Brown.” The social media site also permits pictures of battered women who are bleeding, bruised, tied up, or drugged alongside captions like “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up.” Women, Action & the Media has collected several additional graphic examples here (trigger warning).

Facebook has previously cracked down on other types of hate speech, like Islamophobic and homophobic content. Considering the fact that intimate partner violence is one of the leading causes of death for women around the world, the coalition of women’s activists want the company to treat gender-based hate speech with the same seriousness. “Your refusal to similarly address gender-based hate speech marginalizes girls and women, sidelines our experiences and concerns, and contributes to violence against them,” the open letter explains.

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Politics

Governor Can’t Find A Single Latino In Pennsylvania To Work For Him

By Igor Volsky on May 22, 2013 at 1:00 pm

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) brushed away a question about Latinos working in his administration during a roundtable discussion at The Union League in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Friday, telling the moderator, “If you can find us one let me know”:

MODERATOR: Do you have staff members that are Latino?

CORBETT: No, we do not have any staff members in there. If you can find us one, please let me know.

MODERATOR: I am sure that there are Latinos that…

CORBETT: Do any of you want to come to Harrisburg? See?!

Watch it (via ALDÍA NewsMedia):

“I represent every one of you, I’ve been elected by the people of Pennsylvania to make it better than I found it,” Corbett said at the event. “We need to be able to develop a stronger relationship with all communities…we’re in the process now of getting much more connected with everybody, that we did not have before.”

In 2012, Corbett proclaimed Sept. 15 – Oct. 15 “Hispanic Heritage month,” noting “I commend the many social and economic contributions of Latino-Hispanics in our state and celebrate the rich and diverse culture of Pennsylvania’s fasting growing minority group,” Corbett said and noted that Pennsylvania’s 800,000 Latino residents represent approximately 6.8 percent of the overall population. A 2008 survey found that the Harrisburg-Carlisle metropolitan region “is home to more than 18,000 people of Hispanic or Latino origin,” one third of whom live in the city of Harrisburg. The city is also home to the Latino Hispanic American Community Center.

Corbett has established a commission of Latino affairs, which his website describes as “the Commonwealth’s advocate agency for its Latino community.” “The GACLA makes recommendations to the Governor on policies, procedures and legislation that would affect the Latino community in Pennsylvania and serves as the Governor’s liaison to Latinos in order to ensure that state government is accessible and accountable to the Latino community,” it says.

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