Blog

After 17 years with CPR, media consultant Matt Freeman signs off.

CPR Board President Rob Verchick is out with a new episode of the Connect the Dots podcast, the first in a new season focused on climate justice. As he puts it, "We’re looking at people living in the cross hairs of climate change, those disproportionately carrying the burden of the world and suffering on a daily basis."

Writing in The Hill, CPR's Bill Buzbee and Mažeika Patricio Sullivan expand on a point they and their co-authors on an important article in Science magazine in August made ably: The Trump administration is running roughshod over science and law in its efforts to deregulate.

Staff and Board members of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) denounce the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Memorial Day. We stand with the peaceful protestors calling for radical, systemic reforms to root out racism from our society and all levels of our governing institutions and the policies they administer. CPR Member Scholars and staff are dedicated to listening to and working alongside Black communities and non-Black people of color to call out racism and injustice and demand immediate and long-lasting change. Racism and bigotry cannot continue in the United States if our nation is to live up to its creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

In the latest episode of CPR Board President Rob Verchick's Connect the Dots podcast, he and CPR Member Scholars Michael Duff and Thomas McGarity explore worker safety issues in the era of the coronavirus. McGarity begins the conversation with the story of Annie Grant, a 15-year veteran of the packing line at a Tyson Food poultry processing plant in Camilla, Georgia. One morning in late March, weeks after the nation had awakened to the danger of the coronavirus and states had begun locking down, she felt feverish. When her children urged her to stay home rather than work with a fever on the chilled poultry line, she told them that the company insisted that she continue to work.

In a recent op-ed in the Waco Tribune-Herald, CPR Board Member Thomas McGarity lays bare the real cost of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's efforts to extend a liability shield over businesses that endanger employees or customers by failing to take adequate precautions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Such a shield, he writes, would "destroy a powerful incentive for companies to protect their workers, their consumers, and their neighbors from this invisible killer."

One of the most telling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been its disparate impact on minority communities in the United States. At least three factors seem to be at work in the elevated death rate: uneven access to health care, greater prevalence of preexisting (and often inadequately treated) comorbidities, and greater likelihood of on-the-job exposure. Writing in the Boston Globe last week, CPR Member Scholar Shalanda Baker, together with co-authors Alecia McGregor, Camara Jones, and Michelle Morse, point out yet another way that the pandemic is taking a particular toll on low-income communities and communities of color.

On April 14, CPR's James Goodwin took part in a virtual hearing, hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, on the EPA's "censored science" rule, an effort by EPA to exclude from its rulemaking process a range of scientific studies that industry finds uncongenial to its anti-regulatory views. In his testimony, Goodwin dismantles EPA's contention that the rule is grounded in law, observing that there are no credible legal underpinnings for the proposal.

When I was a 7th grader living in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., my school system was one of many around the nation to launch a program of school busing to desegregate its schools. After 18 years, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally traveled a handful of miles down the road from the Supreme Court and arrived in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I was reminded of that as I listened to the latest episode of Connect the Dots, CPR’s podcast hosted by Rob Verchick, on the Juliana v. United States case