GEORGIA FORUM

By Clare S. Richie


The good news is that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund created by the federal Recovery Act of 2009 is creating jobs for poor families who have limited prospects. This program has the added benefit of stimulating local economies as these newly employed individuals spend their wages close to home.

Thanks to the TANF Emergency Fund, states are expected to create more than 240,000 subsidized jobs in the public and private sectors for TANF recipients, the long-term unemployed, and low-income youth.

Georgia set a goal of placing 5,000 unemployed adults and 15,000 low-income youth into jobs by September 30, 2010, the current deadline. The program is subsidizing 80 percent of adult wages for six months and has already subsidized youth summer employment. To date, Georgia has created new jobs for 14,800 youth and 1,558 adults.


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AMERICAN FORUM

By Daniel Brindis

If you blinked, you might have missed Senator Blanche Lincoln change what your child likely eats for lunch at school. Recently, in the wake of Elena Kagan’s confirmation, the Senate quickly and unanimously passed Lincoln’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

After years of negotiations and a recent push from Michelle Obama, the proposal received 30 seconds of floor time, which was more than enough for it to pass without any objection. The Act will reauthorize the federal school lunch program before the September 30 deadline, and it will also take initial steps to make school lunches healthier, safer, and more accessible.

Although it receives a splinter of the attention given to the two wars, healthcare, and the economy, the school lunch program has a huge impact on America. More than half of U.S. children are eligible for Federal School Lunches and the purchasing power impacts the way our food is grown and consumed. Within schools this means that the lunches served under the school lunch program are served to everybody. In a cafeteria there is no “poor” section or “privileged” section -- it is the same food, same kitchen (that is, when there is a kitchen on premises). Unless you pack your son or daughter’s lunch, this proposal mandates what your children are eating.


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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

ERA: Three States and Nothing More

AMERICAN FORUM

By Carolyn Cook

When you're competing against the clock for the Grand Prize, you may not win, but at least you're entitled to your previous winnings.

Not so with the Equal Rights Amendment. Congress gave women the nod they were due, but their blessing came with a seven-year hitch. Constitutional Equality was an all-or-nothing proposition to be achieved within seven years. Considering it took 72 years to obtain a right to vote, a time limit for all other rights was doomed to fail.

ERA was first introduced in 1923 by Alice Paul, a Republican, lawyer and courageous suffragist – who was imprisoned, tortured and force-fed to obtain the vote for women. ERA was essential to acquire all other legal, economic, social and political privileges that were customarily the birthright of men only.

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AMERICAN FORUM

By Linda Meric

There are many areas of life in this country where it appears that we live in two worlds. And that’s no different when we consider paid sick days. In the first world, if you’re sick, you stay home from work, take care of yourself, and have the time to get better.

In the second world, if you’re sick, you go to work anyway. In the second world, you go to work, even when your child is sick. You know that if you stay home, you’ll lose pay – or maybe even your job.

As we approach Women’s Equality Day on August 26, the day that marks the 90th anniversary of women’s right to vote, it’s troubling that so many of the workers who live in the second world are women. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, more than 22 million women workers lack paid sick days. And though women still bear the brunt of care-giving duties in most American families, we are also the least likely to have a paid sick day available to care for a sick child. Fifty-three percent of working mothers, as compared to 48 percent of working fathers, lack a paid sick day they can use to care for a child.

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AMERICAN FORUM

By Kathleen Rogers

On Aug. 26, we commemorate Women’s Equality Day and reflect on the true meaning of equality. The day is important, not just to evaluate where women are in terms of representation and equal pay for equal work, but also to consider the potential for jumpstarting climate negotiations and the green economy by strengthening women’s leadership in these areas.

Our elected leaders and the world’s heads of state have failed to solve the climate crisis or to shift into a green economy – all while everyone knows that the path we tread will exhaust the world’s food, water and energy. Public opinion strongly favors action; nonetheless, progress is stalled. It’s no coincidence that female participation is dismal in the U.N.’s climate negotiations, in the halls of our government and in corporate board meetings.

Women get the connections between climate change, public health and economic growth, because climate change is disproportionately affecting women. Heat and extreme weather already impede the work that falls on women worldwide, e.g. collecting water and growing crops. Not only are women responsible for as much as 80 percent of farming in the developing world, they’re much more vulnerable to natural disasters than men.


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GEORGIA FORUM

By Major General Paul D. Eaton

Through repeated tours at Fort Benning and eventually serving as its Commanding General, I got to know Georgia and Georgians pretty well. First, among the places I have served, my neighbors around Fort Benning display a pride, patriotism and national security awareness that helped me in my mission at the Home of the Infantry. And they are natural allies to those of us in uniform who devote our careers to America’s national security, our No. 1 priority while on active duty, and in retirement.

Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson will soon have the opportunity to protect America’s national security by voting in favor of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia, which would further a process started by Ronald Reagan to verifiably reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads and 700 deployed launchers. The New START Treaty also ensures strategic stability by reinstating strong verification regime that allow U.S. inspectors, for the first time, to peer inside Russian missiles and track Russian warheads with unique identifiers.

As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has written, “The New START Treaty has the unanimous support of America's military leadership -- to include the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of the service chiefs, and the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, the organization responsible for our strategic nuclear deterrent.”


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GEORGIA FORUM

By Rev. Stephanie Coble Hankins

On top of all the problems working families face in this bleak economy, we can add one more: for the first time in three years the federal minimum wage won’t go up this summer.

From 2007 through 2009, the nation’s lowest paid workers received modest, yet long overdue increases in their paychecks each July. In 2007, Congress finally raised the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour, phased in over three years.

But this year, workers will get nothing. The federal minimum wage will once again be flat unless Congress takes action again.

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MISSISSIPPI FORUM

By Rims Barber

There is a provision of the new Health Reform Law that will help sick Mississippians this year. Nonprofit hospitals will have to meet new indigent care requirements.

Mary Jo went to the hospital recently and was given a bill of over $15,000. She was uninsured and unable to pay more than about $20 per week. It would take her about 15 years to get out from under this debt. Many hospitals are established as private nonprofit entities, and are expected to give back charity care to the community in exchange for their tax-exempt status.

The new Health Reform Law, passed by Congress this year, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, amended Section 501c(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It now requires nonprofit hospitals to publish guidelines for financial assistance, explain who is eligible, and how a person can apply for assistance.


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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Why Health Care Reform Now?

TENNESSEE EDITORIAL FORUM
By R.C. Braun, MD

Both during and after the health care reform debate many pondered two important questions: Why does our country need to reform our health care system? And, especially, why now when we are in the midst of a serious economic recession?

The response to the first question is in fact why it has it taken so long to change a system which is increasingly failing due to inefficiency, excessive cost, frequent poor results, and exclusion of far too many persons? All of these factors contribute significantly to our country’s economic problems and is why health reform is and was so needed.

Now, can we afford to reform our health care system? On the surface it appears that the proposed changes cost far too much. However, the changes are designed to be “budget neutral” by doing away with much of the waste and profiteering, and instead, promoting cost-effective care.


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TENNESSEE EDITORIAL FORUM
By R.C. Braun, MD

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the bill establishing the Social Security Administration. It was bitterly opposed by many as an intrusion of government into the lives of private citizens. As originally envisioned it was a very imperfect and incomplete plan, with many defects. Many millions of needy citizens were not included.

There have been many changes in Social Security since 1935. For the most part, these have been positive changes such as adjusting costs and benefits and including more people. This has been an ongoing evolution. Still today there are imperfections and inequalities, such as the lower contribution rates for the wealthy.

There are still some people who oppose Social Security and say: “I don’t need it and I don’t want it.” But the vast majority of senior Americans are dependent on it. It has made life easier for our entire society. Very few people today would agree to its abolition.



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MISSISSIPPI FORUM
By Michael Lipsky and Ed Sivak

Presently, the work environments of our state and local public service workers are being crippled by the fiscal crisis in the states. Legislatures around the country face gaps of $260 billion in the next two fiscal years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In Mississippi, we estimate a shortfall of over $500 million over each of the next two budget cycles in relation to needs.

For the public workforce, this fiscal crisis threatens functions critical to our communities’ sense of well-being, as well as the economic status of our workforce. County governments have laid-off workers, and state employees have been asked to accept unpaid furloughs and increase their contribution to their retirement funds. Critical positions will remain unfilled, and caseloads will increase. Once again state and local workers will be asked to do more with less.

In Mississippi, 226,000 people work in state, county and municipal governments, part of a workforce of 15 million in these sectors around the country.

The enduring value of the state and local public service was recently dramatized in the aftermath of the tornadoes that swept through Mississippi this spring.


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ALABAMA FORUM

By Pat Byington

Several times I have been invited to the weekly meetings of the Rotary Club of Birmingham. Like any busy business club meeting, with a couple of hundred people in attendance, there is a chorus of knives, forks and spoons, clanging ever so slightly as members try to finish their meal when a speaker begins to speak. This past May, when Bill Finch, former director of Conservation at the Nature Conservancy and longtime nature writer spoke to Rotary it took only 30 seconds before the room fell completely silent.

He was speaking about the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Only a few weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, Finch described the slow moving invasion that was taking place on Alabama’s and the Gulf Coast’s shores and its devastating impact on our people and the environment. When he finished his presentation, the audience was shell-shocked. I remember walking amongst the members of the club after the meeting – heads were shaking, and shoulders slightly lowered. The members were somber.


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AMERICAN FORUM

By Steve Macek and Mitchell Szczepanczyk

On December 3, 2009, the cable giant Comcast announced plans to buy NBC/Universal from General Electric in a $28 billion merger.

Ever since, lawmakers in Washington and legions of activists have been raising the alarm about the threat such a deal would pose to telecommunication workers, cable and Internet users, and communities of color.

As a result, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the Justice Department, and two Congressional committees have spent months carefully reviewing the proposed merger. The FCC even held a public hearing on the matter in Chicago last month.


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MISSOURI FORUM

By Jane H. Aiken

Incarceration rates in Missouri are 12 percent higher than the nation. We also spend 6.8 percent of our state budget on the cost of incarceration.

Currently there are over 30,000 men and women in Missouri’s prisons. Reducing that number would substantially reduce costs so we can better spend that money to support the thousands in the state who find themselves out of work, hungry and homeless.

Governors all over the nation are looking hard for ways to stop unnecessary, costly incarceration. Absent some kind of expansive legislative action, this cost-saving strategy rests solely in the hands of the governor. The concern, appropriately, is that if we release these prisoners, will they commit new crimes?

So how can we reduce the prison population, while at the same time, protect Missourians?

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TENNESSEE EDITORIAL FORUM

By Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson

Bob Corker has defied typecasting for a freshman senator, emerging in his first few years in the U.S. Capitol as a go-to leader for getting work done across party lines. Tennesseans should urge him to continue in this vein by leading his fellow Republicans in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to support the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).

New START, which was signed by President Obama and Russian President Medvedev this April, is presently under review by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and could be sent to the Senate floor as soon as late July. The Treaty is a conservative and modest reduction in both nations’ strategic nuclear forces. It limits each side’s deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550, a reduction of approximately 30 percent from the 2002 Moscow Treaty, and restricts deployed delivery vehicles—ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers—to 800.

Perhaps most significantly, New START will continue the verification regime that has given us intelligence on Russian forces for the past two decades. START I, which was proposed by President Reagan and signed by President George H.W. Bush, expired last December. Though both nations have agreed to continue abiding by its provisions in the interim, the need to formalize these trust-building mechanisms has led Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to urge the Senate to ratify New START “as soon as possible.”


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AMERICAN FORUM

By John Castellaw

In April President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START), a measure designed to mutually and verifiably reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Specifically, it would reduce U.S. and Russian warheads by approximately one third and would continue and strengthen the verification regime that has allowed the inspections and surveillance that have informed U.S. intelligence about Russian nuclear forces for decades.

The treaty is now before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and may come before the full Senate for a vote on ratification this summer.

Over the last several months, Americaís military leaders and national security expertsófrom both Republican and Democratic administrationsóhave testified before Senate committees, all with the same message: the treatyís modest mutual reductions and strengthened verification regime improve our national security, and the Senate should ratify the treaty.




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