Amanda Terkel: Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage Orders Removal Of Labor Mural From State Agency

[The governor says they are offensive to the business community and that the pictures intimidate business people. He can produce no complaints and cannot say why they are offensive. Do they look intmidating to you?]



Amanda Terkel: Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage Orders Removal Of Labor Mural From State Agency

Charles Eisenstein: The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies
by Charles Eisenstein
Reality Sandwhich

Let's begin with beer. Near my home I drive past a billboard advertisement for Coors Light. The slogan is, "Coors rocks Harrisburg." Now, does anybody actually believe that Coors does in fact "rock Harrisburg?" No. Does the Coors corporation itself believe it? No. Does anyone believe that Coors believes it? No. It is a lie, everyone knows it is a lie, and no one cares. Everyone automatically writes it off as an ad slogan, an image campaign.

The next sign advertises Miller Beer with the phrase, "Fresh beer tastes better." Does anyone actually think Miller is fresher than Budweiser, Coors, or Pabst? No. Does anyone at Miller Brewing think that? No. It is another obvious and unremarkable lie, beneath the threshold of most people's awareness. But it contributes to a feeling of living in a phony world where words don't matter and nothing is real.

Here is another beer slogan, for Carlsburg: "Probably the best beer in the world." Obviously, the word "probably" has been chosen to suggest that someone devoted great consideration to this question, sampled all the world's great beers, and finally issued an impartial judgment. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. No one thinks it did. Everyone knows that actually what happened is a bunch of advertising pros thought up a slogan in an effort to create an "image." Isn't it remarkable that lies are still effective even when no one believes them? Unfortunately, when it hardly matters whether words are truth or lies, then words lose their power to convey the truth.

Continuing on my way, I drive past the Colonial Park Mall, a generic, boxy edifice amidst a vast expanse of concrete. There is no park here, nor is there actually any connection with anything "colonial," a word chosen to evoke an image of simple times, kind folk, and quality craftsmanship. The mall is home to a food court called "Café in the Park," a name chosen to evoke (who knows?) a Parisian café with outdoor tables under the shade of the trees. Basically, the entire name is a lie. No café, no park, nothing colonial. And this lie is, again, completely unremarkable.

Increasingly, words don't mean anything. In politics, campaigning candidates make statements that flatly contradict their actions and policies, and no one seems to object or even care. It is not the routine dissembling of political figures that is striking, but rather our near-complete indifference to it. We are as well almost completely inured to the vacuity of advertising copy, the words of which increasingly mean nothing at all to the reader. Does anyone really believe that GE "brings good things to life?" Or that a housing development I passed today - "Walnut Crossing" - actually has any walnut trees or crossings? From brand names to PR slogans to political code-words, the language of the media that inundates modern life consists almost wholly of subtle lies, misdirection, and manipulation.

We live in a ubiquitous matrix of lies, a sea of mendacity so pervasive that it is nearly invisible. Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so subtle they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.

The most shocking thing about the lies of the Bush administration was that those lies were not actually shocking to most people. Why do we as a society seemingly accept our leaders' gross dishonesty as a matter of course? Why does the repeated exposure of their lies seem to arouse barely a ripple of indignation among the general public? Where is the protest, the outrage, the sense of betrayal?

It is certainly not to be found in the person of Barack Obama. Just as there is little difference between Coors and Miller, so also is there little difference in the policies of Bush and Obama. I realize that this statement will provoke outrage from many of my readers. Sure, there are some differences between them - enough to establish Obama as a new brand - but the basic course of empire, of finance, the military, medicine, law, education, of all the defining institutions of our society remains unchanged.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Architects of War

Architects of War
To The Best of Our Knowledge (Wisconsin Public Radio)

On March 20, 2003, the US invaded Iraq. More than 6 years later we're still there. What happened? Were we prepared? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll talk with the planners of the war in Iraq. From Neoconservatives, to Department of Defense officials. From members of the Iraqi government to military personnel. Will their preparations lead us to peace or … more war?

SEGMENT 1:



After a quick look back at Neo-conservative Richard Perle's 2003 justification for war with Iraq, Steve Paulson talks with Douglas Feith about decision-making in the wake of 9/ll. Feith is a leading neo-conservative intellectual, who was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under Donald Rumsfeld, and one of the architects of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. He is the author of "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism." Also, Colonel David Lapan is Director of Public Affairs for the U.S. Marine Corps and was one of the architects of the Defense Department's Embedded Media Program. Jim Fleming caught up with him one hectic day at the Pentagon and they talked about the merits of the embed program.

SEGMENT 2:



David Kilcullen is the author of "The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One." Kilcullen was a top military advisor to General Petraeus during the troop surge in Iraq. He tells Anne Strainchamps that most counter-insurgency efforts fail because foreign armies usually galvanize opposition from local people. Also, Ali Allawi was Minister of Trade and Minister of Defense in the Interim Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 and 2004. He resigned his position as Minister of Finance in the Iraqi Transitional Government because he was frustrated by the political infighting. Allawi recalls his experiences and reflects on the present situation during this conversation with Steve Paulson. Allawi's book is called "The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War: Losing the Peace."



SEGMENT 3:



Journalist Thomas Ricks writes for The Washington Post and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. He's also the author of books called "Fiasco" and "The Gamble," both about the war in Iraq. He talks with Jim Fleming about how close the U.S. came to losing the war in Iraq on November 19, 2004 in a town called Haditha, 150 miles north of Baghdad.

To Listen to the Episode

Donna Cooper: Infographic -- Tax Breaks vs. Budget Cuts

Infographic: Tax Breaks vs. Budget Cuts
By Donna Cooper
Center for American Progress

House leaders are unfortunately restricting their proposed budget cuts for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 to nonsecurity discretionary spending in an attempt to tame a $1.3 trillion deficit. This approach is especially shortsighted since the Federal Treasury loses twice as much revenue due to tax breaks than Congress appropriates on all nonsecurity discretionary spending.

The chart below compares the 10 safety-net programs slated for deep cuts with the cost of the tax breaks that should also be considered for reduction or elimination to bring the budget into balance. The column on the left is a list of safety-net programs that have already been targets of the House leadership’s budget ax. The column on the right is the cost to specified tax breaks.



To Read the Discussion of the Facts/Figures and to Review the Sources for the Results/Chart

Michael Thorn: Television Discourse and Governmentality: Considering Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall as Citizen Projects

Television Discourse and Governmentality: Considering Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall as Citizen Projects
by Michael Thorn
Cineaction #82/83 (Hosted on Free Library)

...

This analysis will use a Foucauldian governmental approach that borrows from political economy. A governmental approach is a context-specific approach that analyzes cultural institutions, products, and discourses in terms of tactics and strategies of influence and control where power and knowledge work together to regulate, manage, problematize, and maintain and/or change behaviour and thought. (3) This approach assumes that "discourses structure action, belief and conduct" (4) and it has been applied to both film and television. (5) It also assumes that discourses compete with each other as "wills to knowledge" and "wills to power" in what Foucault calls "truth games." (6) Understood in this way, discourse is both more and less than ideological. That is, this approach understands that tactics and strategies can be resisted, rejected, and contested both by those addressed and by others seeking to address the same audience. As Foucault says, "[t]he power relationship and freedom's refusal to submit cannot ... be separated." (7) However, this approach also understands that the types and forms of knowledge and power used to underlie the "truth" of any particular discourse will still have an impact on that text's ability to maintain, control, or change thought. A governmental analysis of discourse in film, television, and new media, then, is not so much concerned with how the spectator is hailed to accept as true, uncritically, a certain ideology, or, alternatively, how a certain discourse can be deconstructed to reveal its inherent contradictions, or even how a multiplicity of spectator positions can frame a text in different ways; rather, this approach is concerned with the methods, practices, and knowledges used to try to persuade spectators to accept as valid particular perspectives--perspectives seeking to maintain, control, or change enough thought about an issue or problem so as to have an impact on that problem. As such, this approach should also work to uncover the political, economic, and institutional influences reinforcing these discursive tactics and strategies. This is why the discipline of political economy is perfectly suited to dovetail with a governmental analysis. According to Vincent Mosco, political economy is the study of "the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources." (8) How discourses, especially media discourses, are constituted politically and economically prior to and during distribution and consumption have definite effects on their governmental influence. For Mosco, the key entry point for political economy is the process of commodification, but this process must also be understood in relation to processes of spatialization and structuration. (9) While this paper does refer to the profit-driven commercialization of Canadian television, a process of commodification, and also to the relationship between the regional politics of Vancouver and the national politics of Canada, a spaclalized relationship, the political economic emphasis in this paper will be on how the discourse of the Da Vinci series participates in structuring and promoting certain kinds of social relations, particularly power relations; in this case, as they pertain to the relationship between certain governmental institutions (the police and coroner's office) and certain vulnerable populations in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (drug users and sex-trade workers). Of course, for Foucault, technologies of power intersect with technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, and technologies of the self. (10) As such, the Foucauldian emphasis here will be on how the narrative sign system of the show is constituted with the power to influence and change thought and action (or the self) on the issue of harm-reduction through productive influences. In other words, this paper will use as its entry point that intersection where the show's explicit textual meaning meets both its socio-political context and (some of) the creative elements of its production. 1 am using this as my entry point to highlight the show's obvious political agenda, which seems to operate above and beyond any desire of the show's producers to generate profit.

To Read the Entire Essay

Walkouts, Bank Boycotts and Recalls: Wisconsin Protests Intensify As Union-Busting Legislation Pushed Through State Assembly

Walkouts, Bank Boycotts and Recalls: Wisconsin Protests Intensify As Union-Busting Legislation Pushed Through State Assembly
Democracy Now

Democracy Now! reports from the streets of Madison, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker prepares to sign legislation that will strip away the collective bargaining rights of most public employees. On Thursday, more than 1,000 Madison students walked out of classes; firefighters called for a boycott of a bank with ties to Walker; and the AFL-CIO pushed for the recall of Republican senators. More than 100,000 people are expected to fill the streets of Madison on Saturday.

To Watch/Listen/Read

Michelle Chen: State Budget Battles Converge on Prison Labor Force

State Budget Battles Converge on Prison Labor Force
by Michelle Chen
In These Times

Prison isn't just about doing hard time. For many, it's about working full-time, too. These days, state governments seem ready to squeeze their captive workforces to plug budget gaps on the cheap.

From the chain gang to the gulag, labor in the prison population predates our modern labor regulations and to this day, remains relatively untouched by the legal protections afforded to regular workers. So in most states, prison work has come to be seen as a hybrid between conscript labor and rehabilitation, putting otherwise “idle” inmates to work on farms, manufacturing plants, and janitorial jobs.

The New York Times reports that in many areas, laborers in prison jump suits are a growing presence at many public work sites, suggesting that they're being used to alleviate fiscal pressures now eroding common public sector services:

[O]fficials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.

In New Jersey, inmates on roadkill patrol clean deer carcasses from highways. Georgia inmates tend municipal graveyards. In Ohio, they paint their own cells. In California, prison officials hope to expand existing programs, including one in which wet-suit-clad inmates repair leaky public water tanks. There are no figures on how many prisoners have been enrolled in new or expanded programs nationwide, but experts in criminal justice have taken note of the increase.

As we reported in December, prison labor conditions have sparked some noteworthy revolts. A wave of strikes rocked several prisons in Georgia late last year, touching off a national campaign for the dignified treatment of prison workers.

The uprisings shed light on how vulnerable inmates are when the prison-industrial complex operates not just as a warden and dictator but a boss as well, marshalling the labor of thousands with little oversight. The Georgia inmates drafted a list of grievances ranging from abusive treatment and work without wages.

The inmates' direct actions resonated with civil rights groups who have pointed out disturbing continuities between the era of slavery and the racialization of imprisonment, and by extension, the industries tied to it. The mass incarceration of black men, and their punitive deployment—explicitly sanctioned under the Constitution—in the dregs of industrial capitalism, speaks loud and clear to the theory of prison as America's “new Jim Crow.”

Allegations that prison guards severely beat an inmate protester in retaliation underscore the inequality endemic to this labor system, even though the programs are typically endorsed as a form of rehabilitation and self-help.

Of course, today's prison labor is more regulated and considerably less brutal than the post-Civil War convict-lease system—a regression to slavery disguised as a criminal penalty. (Some reforms were enacted during the Great Depression to prevent downward-spiraling competition between “free labor” and incarcerated workers.)

Yet the institutional parallels are striking. From the late-19th through the early 20th century, southern states, including Georgia, turned to prison labor as a release valve for dealing with fiscal crisis, and the white supremacist power structure, through “leases” with the private sector, enabled forced labor, torture and abuse on a massive scale.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow: Prison Rape and the Government

Prison Rape and the Government
by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow.
The New York Review of Books



Back in 1998, Jan Lastocy was serving time for attempted embezzlement in a Michigan prison. Her job was working at a warehouse for a nearby men’s prison. She got along well with two of the corrections officers who supervised her, but she thought the third was creepy. “He was always talking about how much power he had,” she said, “how he liked being able to write someone a ticket just for looking at him funny.” Then, one day, he raped her.

Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” If Jan had gone to the officers she trusted, they would have had to repeat her story to the same warden. Jan was only a few months away from release to a halfway house. She was desperate to get out of prison, to return to her husband and children. So she kept quiet—and the officer raped her again, and again. There were plenty of secluded places in the huge warehouse, behind piles of crates or in the freezer. Three or four times a week he would assault her, from June all the way through December, and the whole time she was too terrified to report the attacks. Later, she would be tormented by guilt for not speaking out, because the same officer went on to rape other women at the prison. In a poem, Jan wrote:

These are a few of the reasons why prisoners fear reporting rape.
Fear of being written up and possibly losing good time.
Fear of retaliation.
Fear of feeling that no one will believe them.
Fear of feeling that no one really cares.

For all these reasons, a large majority of inmates who have been sexually abused by staff or by other inmates never report it.1 And corrections officials, with some brave exceptions, have historically taken advantage of this reluctance to downplay or even deny the problem. According to a recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a branch of the Department of Justice, there were only 7,444 official allegations of sexual abuse in detention in 2008, and of those, only 931 were substantiated. These are absurdly low figures. But perhaps more shocking is that even when authorities confirmed that corrections staff had sexually abused inmates in their care, only 42 percent of those officers had their cases referred to prosecution; only 23 percent were arrested, and only 3 percent charged, indicted, or convicted. Fifteen percent were actually allowed to keep their jobs.

How many people are really victimized every year? Recent BJS studies using a “snapshot” technique have found that, of those incarcerated on the days the surveys were administered, about 90,000 had been abused in the previous year, but as we have argued previously,2 those numbers were also misleadingly low. Finally, in January, the Justice Department published its first plausible estimates. In 2008, it now says, more than 216,600 people were sexually abused in prisons and jails and, in the case of at least 17,100 of them, in juvenile detention. Overall, that’s almost six hundred people a day—twenty-five an hour.

The department divides sexual abuse in detention into four categories. Most straightforward, and most common, is rape by force or the threat of force. An estimated 69,800 inmates suffered this in 2008.3 The second category, “nonconsensual sexual acts involving pressure,” includes 36,100 inmates coerced by such means as blackmail, offers of protection, and demanded payment of a jailhouse “debt.” This is still rape by any reasonable standard.

An estimated 65,700 inmates, including 6,800 juveniles, had sex with staff “willingly.” But it is illegal in all fifty states for corrections staff to have any sexual contact with inmates. Since staff can inflict punishments including behavioral reports that may extend the time people serve, solitary confinement, loss of even the most basic privileges such as showering, and (legally or not) violence, it is often impossible for inmates to say no.4 Finally, the department estimates that there were 45,000 victims of “abusive sexual contacts” in 2008: unwanted touching by another inmate “of the inmate’s buttocks, thigh, penis, breasts, or vagina in a sexual way.” Overall, most victims were abused not by other inmates but, like Jan, by corrections staff: agents of our government, paid with our taxes, whose job it is to keep inmates safe.

All the numbers we have cited count people who were abused, not instances of abuse. People raped behind bars cannot escape their attackers, though. They must live in constant fear, their trauma renewed every time they see their assailants. Between half and two thirds of those who claim sexual abuse in adult facilities say it happened more than once; previous BJS studies suggest that victims endure an average of three to five attacks each per year.5

We believe that the department’s estimate probably remains too low. It is based on extensive surveys conducted by the BJS in which inmates were able to report abuse anonymously. Some inmates probably fabricated such reports, creating “false positives,” and some who had been abused probably decided not to report it, creating “false negatives.” Since it is impossible to know how many errors of either kind there were, the department chose simply to take the BJS results at face value.

In our opinion, the surveys were effectively designed to discourage false reporting, which would usually be done with the intent of creating trouble for the accused perpetrator or in hopes of being moved to a different facility. The surveys therefore simply didn’t take names—of victims or perpetrators. (The surveys’ authors also devised a number of ways to check for and discount false claims.) On the other hand, inmates would be likely not to report real abuse from shame, or because it was too painful, or out of fear that those guaranteeing their anonymity could not be trusted—and no survey could be designed to overcome those considerations effectively. Moreover, the department’s estimate does not include the many people who are sexually abused in, for example, the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration detention facilities, in police lockups, or by their probation and parole officers.

Even the department’s estimate is of epidemic numbers, however. It shows that there is a human rights crisis in our own country. The people raped in our prisons are our fellow citizens, family members, and neighbors. And when they’re released, as 95 percent of them will be eventually, they bring their trauma home with them, back to our communities.

The notion that rape is inevitable in our prisons is, as the Justice Department says, “not only incorrect but incompatible with American values.” After all, the government has extraordinary control over the lives of people whom it locks up and keeps under surveillance every hour of every day. Preventing sexual abuse in detention is primarily a matter of management. The policies needed are, for the most part, straightforward: for example, considering characteristics that make an inmate especially vulnerable when deciding where to house him, such as homosexuality or a history of prior abuse. Well-run prisons have adopted such policies already, and their rates of sexual assault are dramatically lower than the national average. But for too long, too many facilities have failed to take these basic measures.

To Read the Rest of the Review Essay

Fresh Air: Dirk Vandewalle Peers Inside Qaddafi's World

Dirk Vandewalle Peers Inside Qaddafi's World
Fresh Air (NPR)

Dirk Vandewalle, an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, gives an inside look at Qaddafi and his 42 year long rule in Libya. Vandewalle has studied and written about Libya since the 1980s. In 1986 he lived in Libya for 14 months, as the only Western scholar at the time.

To Listen to the Interview

Government Report: U.S. Has Wasted Tens Of Billions Of Dollars On Contractors In Iraq And Afghanistan

Report: U.S. Has Wasted Tens Of Billions Of Dollars On Contractors In Iraq And Afghanistan
by Susan Crabtree
Talking Points Memo

A new report from a bipartisan commission set up to scrutinize the unprecedented use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan concludes that the United States has wasted tens of billions of the nearly $177 billion that has been spent on those contracts and grants since 2002.

The report, titled "At What Risk? Correcting Over-reliance on Contractors in Contingency Operations," said its estimate may even understate the problem because it may not take into full account ill-conceived projects, poor planning and oversight by the U.S. government, as well as criminal behavior and blatant corruption by both government and contractor employees.

"For many years," the report says, "the government has abdicated its contracting responsibilities - too often using contractors as the default mechanism ... without consideration for the resources needed to manage them."

The commission, chaired by Michael Thibault, former deputy director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, and former Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) holds a hearing Monday to review the new report's findings.

About 200,000 contractor employees are working in Iraq and Afghanistan -- a number roughly equal to the American military forces deployed there, according to the report. Their work includes guarding bases, building facilities, providing food and laundry services, escorting supply and personnel movements, and translating local languages.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Empire: Information wars -- How will governments deal with the information revolution?

Information wars: How will governments deal with the information revolution?
Empire (Al Jazeera)



Information is power and in the age of the information revolution, cyber and satellite communication is transforming our lives, reinventing the relationship between people and power.

New media, from WikiLeaks to Facebook, Twitter to YouTube, is persistently challenging the traditional flow of information, and cyber disobedience is exposing powerful governments.

Websites are now being treated like hostile territories; whistleblowers and leakers as terrorists, and hackers as insurgents.

Governments are scrambling to salvage their influence and take advantage of the new cyber and satellite media. From China to the Sudan, Egypt to Iran, despots and armies are tracking web activity and setting up Facebook accounts to spy on their citizens.

So is this the century of free information and expression as the cyber utopians predicted, or new methods of electronic oppression as the cyber sceptics warned?

Joining Marwan Bishara to discuss these issues are: Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Professor Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Our interviewees are: Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Charlie Beckett, the director of Polis at London School of Economics; Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei.org, and Pink Ke, the co-founder of antiwave.net

A Reply to a Mass Email That All We Need to Do Is Remove the Current Elected Officials and Our Political System Will Be Fixed

[My response to a mass email sent by a relative trying to convince people that what need to do is to get rid of the current elected representatives and that will solve our current social/economic problems]

I would like to encourage you all to reconsider what the problem is here. You can do whatever you want to your elected officials, but they are not really the true problem. I would encourage you to look into the recent Supreme Court decision on "Citizen United vs the US" and consider the implications of unregulated corporate cash influx into our so-called democratic elections. The problem is the unchecked flow of corporate money in our democracy and the dependence of our elected officials on that money to get elected (and re-elected). Get rid of many as you want, the new ones will still be dependent on the same masters.....

Take, for instance, the Tea Party, which is corporate funded and is not about dismantling the current system. What they are about is deregulating the social system in order to continue to benefit our country's elites (this is not to discount the legitimate worries of the Tea Party masses, this is to say they are being misled by their corporate funded leadership). The first thing newly elected Tea Party Senator Rand Paul did here in KY was to seek to continue the tax cuts Bush had temporarily instituted for those that make over 250,000 dollars.

A current report from Democracy Now lets us know how bad it is for working people who have lost their jobs and/or have seen their wages frozen/cut these past few years:

Food banks across the country are serving a record number of people and many agencies are struggling to meet the demand ahead of Thanksgiving. In Texas, the Montgomery County Food Bank served a record 31,000 people last month. The Washington Post reports the demand for meals at the Arlington Food Assistance Center in Virginia
has jumped 50 percent in the past two years. In the Washington DC area, the Capital Area Food Bank is on pace to distribute a record 30 million pounds of food this year, an increase of more than 10 percent since 2009. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of families seeking assistance from food pantries jumped from 3.9 million in 2007 to 5.6 million last year. The number of U.S.
households deemed "food insecure" also exceeded 50 million last year, amounting to a record 14.7 percent.

... and then this report comes out in the NY Times about all-time record corporate profits last quarter:

Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter

Record "profits" for the few through the exploitation of workers. Record "growth" for corporations through systemic economic disparity and extreme poverty for the majority of workers. Currently 1 in 7 families in America are at or below the poverty line ($22,000 for a family of four), in KY it is 1 in 4. This is disturbing to me.

Michael