NY AG: NYPD shouldn’t make traffic stops
Vital home health work earns low pay, Broken U.S. healthcare undermines vaccine trials, South Baltimore pollution fight
The family of Breonna Taylor demands the release of the full grand jury report, transcripts and evidence.
Donald Trump is expected to nominate right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court today.
New York Attorney General Letitia James recommends NYPD should no longer make traffic stops.
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📉 Fastest-Growing U.S. Job Failed to Lift Pay for Black Women
“It’s taken a public-health emergency to shine a spotlight on the precarious conditions and low pay in this key corner of America’s direct-care economy -- a key employer for Black women, in particular -- and turn it into an issue for presidential politics. Democratic candidate Joe Biden is promising a $775 billion investment in the industry, which he says will help give carers a pay raise.”
“Biden says his investment in the care economy will help deliver a pay raise for workers who look after the elderly and pre-school children, without specifying how much. President Donald Trump has praised health-care workers, likening them to soldiers, but hasn’t outlined plans for the industry in his re-election platform.”
“Scholars say that the prominent role of Black women in the caring professions dates back to slavery and the Jim Crow era. And the industry was historically left out of legislation to protect workers’ rights, even during the 1930s New Deal era that revolutionized so many other jobs.”
We’re putting ourselves at risk. We’re becoming sick, and getting our family members sick, and it just goes unnoticed. They think: ‘Well, they’re going to come to work anyway, because they need the money.’
Shawanna Ferguson
(Bloomberg)
Shawanna Ferguson (credit: Micah Green/Bloomberg)
🦠 Among people of color asked to join Covid-19 vaccine trials, worries about inequities run deep
“That the communities hardest hit by Covid-19 have also been woefully underrepresented in clinical trials is no coincidence, and in racing to find 30,000 participants who could represent an even broader population, pharma companies have found themselves face to face with health care’s deepest fault lines. Being Black, Latinx, Native American, or Pacific Islander, for instance, means you are more likely to go without health insurance than if you’re white, and that makes a difference. If you want people to sign up as test subjects for experimental vaccines, it helps if they feel comfortable going to a hospital — and are able to take sick leave.”
(STAT)
🚨 Inside the Fight to Shut Down Baltimore's Pollution-Spewing Trash Incinerator
“As the primary way that Baltimore disposes of waste, BRESCO incinerates 2,250 tons of trash every day down to ash a quarter of the weight. The facility, which has been operating since 1985, generates 5% of the city’s electricity. But it’s also the single largest source of pollution in Baltimore, which is ranked one of the most polluted cities in the country. Residents there are plagued by asthma and mortality rates of cancer, heart disease, and stroke that far outpace the national average.”
“South Baltimore also houses the Quarantine Road Landfill—where all of BRESCO’s toxic ash is dumped—the country’s largest medical waste incinerator, a wastewater treatment facility, a major coal exporting port, and an animal rendering plant. Over a dozen sites nearby have been designated Brownfields, or land contaminated by industrial use, by the EPA.”
Damn near everyone here has a breathing issue. The air is different. It’s a silent killer. It’s been a recipe for all sorts of health problems. We can no longer serve as the armpit of the city.
If you drive here at certain times of night, it smells like death. Everything that is stinky, polluting, gross, and will kill you is down here.
- Keisha Allen, Westport Neighborhood Association
(VICE)