failure

3Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Failure To Pay Fines And Having Driver’s License Suspensions Inflict Particular Harm On Black Drivers

Imagine being unable to pay a US$50 traffic ticket and, as a result, facing mounting fees so high that even after paying hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars toward your debt you still owe money. Imagine being fired from your job because you’ve been forced to use unreliable public transportation instead of your car. And imagine going to jail several times because, even though your license is suspended, you had to drive to work. These are some of the situations facing millions of Americans who were unable to pay fines – and whose lives were turned into a nightmare by overly punitive policies in response. And these policies have an outsize, and damaging, impact on Black Americans, according to our research. Cycles of debt Most cities and states have policies that allow them to suspend...

Failure to shore up state budgets may hit women’s wallets especially hard

States are seeing enormous budget shortfalls because of the coronavirus pandemic, and the consequences for teachers and other public school employees could be dire. At least 640,000 education jobs in state and local government vanished between February and August 2020. The states, which provide an average of about 47% of U.S. public school funding, are cutting school spending because their tax revenue is declining and they have no easy recourse to balance their budgets; unlike the federal government, states can’t just print money. Negotiations continue around another pandemic relief bill, which would include money for states to spend on public education. But lawmakers have passed no measures since May, when the House of Representatives passed a US$3 trillion coronavirus relief bill that ...

Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

More U.S. citizens have confirmed COVID-19 infections than the next five most affected countries combined. Yet as recently as mid-March, President Trump downplayed the gravity of the crisis by falsely claiming the coronavirus was nothing more than seasonal flu, or a Chinese hoax, or a deep state plot designed to damage his reelection bid. The current U.S. administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus threat is part of a larger problem in pandemic management. Many government officials, medical experts, scholars and journalists continued to underestimate the dangers of COVID-19, even as the disease upended life in China as early as mid-January. The results of this collective inertia are catastrophic indeed. The U.S., along with Italy, Spain, Iran and the French Alsace, is now the site of...