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mightyflamethrower · 10 months

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Inside, the Giant on Alabama Avenue in Ward 8 was abuzz with shoppers loading up on produce, diapers and snacks for the weekend. But outside, the mood was a bit more anxious, as shoppers wandered over to Trayon White Sr.’s pop-up resource fair to hear the Ward 8 D.C. Council memberdeliver what sounded like a dire plea to save the store.

“This is a message to our community that we stand in solidarity about keeping this grocery option open,” White said to a throng of news cameras.

He had just had a meeting with Giant’s regional leadership, and had come away feeling a need to sound the alarm. The Giant on Alabama Avenueisthe only major grocery store in the entire ward, serving more than 85,000 people, and White had the sense its future could be at risk. The management reported an uptick in shoplifting and crime at the Ward 8 location. The managers had, according to White, spent hundreds of thousands on security upgrades and yet, White said, were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month because of theft. They didn’t say they were planning on closing the store. But still, White was worried, and now so were some of the residents who relied on it.

“If we don’t have this one, there will be nowhere else,” said Traci Pratt, a 58-year-old Ward 8 resident who has been shopping at the Giant ever since it opened in 2007.

The anxiety surrounding a single grocery store in Ward 8 underscores the limited access to quality food east of theAnacostia River, leaving officials like White to cling tightly to the community’s only available option when its future appears rocky. “This is more than just a food store — it’s a central part of our community hub,” White said.

It’s not entirely clear just how rocky things are for Giant. The store declined to provide financial information to The Washington Post about the impact of shoplifting, but in a statement, made an assurance that it does not have any “current plans” to shut down.

“However, we need to be able to run our stores safely and profitably,”read the statement, sent by spokesperson Felis Andrade. “The reality is that theft and violence at this store is significant, and getting worse, not better. As a result, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to operate under these conditions.”

The Giant filled an enormous gap in Ward 8 when it opened its doors in 2007. The grand opening drew a visit from the mayor, gaggles of reporters, balloons, elated shoppers and even serenades from violinists. At the time, it had been about a decade since the ward had its own full-service grocery store, and so the thought of losing it again — to those who have watched this space evolve from a field of weeds to a crowded retail center — is enough to cause some hand-wringing.

On Friday, the parking lotwas full, the checkout lineswere packed and, for safety, therewas a mobile police camera hovering in the parking lot and a security guard standing by the door.

Giant’s leadership began going public with broad concerns about theft and crime in news reports earlier this year. It wasn’t just about the Ward 8 location, and it wasn’t just Giant. Retailers across the country have been exiting large urban centers, citing problems with increased organized retail crime as well as lower foot traffic and inflation-related issues.

Grocery stores run on slim profit margins, so higher costs for operations, labor and rent have put even more pressure on companies. Giant Food, which has 165 supermarkets across D.C., Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, has not closed any stores yet, and has made certain efforts to avoid doing so, company president Ira Kress told The Post in May. With theft and crime being one of the more prevalent issues, Giant limited the number of entrances at itsstores to create more obstacles for shoplifters — a tactic that drew objections from the city’s fire inspector. Stores are also locking away more merchandise; skimming shelves of high-value, frequently stolen items; limiting self-checkout to 20 items; and installing wall dispensers that make noise when items are removed.

As retailers leave some cities, one grocery chain is trying to stay

“We have invested in a host of measures to mitigate the issue at this store, and across many stores, but we also need the help and partnership from the community and local officials to truly combat the theft and violence that continues to escalate,” the Giant spokesperson said in the statement Friday.

White noted Giant’s regional management planned to sit down with the city’s economic development department in the mayor’s office possibly as soon as next week, something a spokesman for the department, Ben Fritsch, said is part of ongoing talks about how the city can assist with keeping the store safe and thriving.

White stressed to any residents who mayhave been listening that they should turn to nonprofit partners that provide help with food security issues if they can’t afford groceries, rather than resort to theft.

For some reason I find this to be hilarious.

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ourplanetary-blog · 7 years

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Americans Demand Single-Payer Health Care at GOP Town Hall

New Post has been published on http://ourplanetary.com/americans-demand-single-payer-health-care-at-gop-town-hall/

Americans Demand Single-Payer Health Care at GOP Town Hall

Earlier this month, a reporter asked Nancy Pelosi if Democrats should run on a single-payer platform in 2018. Pelosi said no – that the “consolation degree” for a central authority-funded health care device is just “no longer there but” amongst a broad sufficient base of Americans.

Pelosi may feel in a different way had she been at Rep. Tom MacArthur’s metropolis corridor in Willington, New Jersey, Wednesday night time. Over 4-and-a-half grueling hours, the mild Republican accountable for resurrecting the American Health Care Act become pilloried by his parts, who argued forcefully, and time and again, in choose of a single-payer system.

New Jersey’s 0.33 congressional district runs the width of the nation, from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean. A deep V divides it into two almost distinct areas whose backside corners just barely touch at the middle. The eastern part of the district lies in Ocean County, domestic to the nation’s wealthiest enclave, Mantoloking; the western 1/2 sits squarely in Burlington County. A sandy swath of land referred to as the Pine Barrens runs between the two.

Willingboro Township, just across the Delaware River from Northern Philadelphia, is part of Burlington County. It’s seventy-three percentage black and has an in line with-capita earnings of much less than $22,000. It is not Tom MacArthur’s middle constituency. As the congressman notes in his commencing salvo Wednesday, Trump picked up just 9 percentage of the vote in Willingboro, whilst he himself “beaten it with 12 percentage.”

“In this part of the district, there are forty,000 more Democrats than Republicans,” the congressman says. “But after I force across the Pine Barrens tonight to move home, and I get out on the other side, I’ll be in a [county] that Donald Trump gained via greater than 90,000 votes. … I ought to represent each facet: this aspect, and also the opposite side, where our president gained two-to-one – two-to-one!”

MacArthur thinks of himself as a centrist, but this session he’s voted with Trump ninety-three percentage of the time. The most vital of those votes changed into the only the solid closing week, in want of the GOP plan to repeal and update Obamacare. He did not just vote for it, both – he wrote the amendment that was given the bill thru the House.

MacArthur is aware of the coverage industry properly. He likes to tout the reality that he made simply $13,000-a-12 months in his first process as an insurance investigator inside the New York City Housing Projects – yes, he brags approximately starting his career via taking health advantages far away from poor human beings. He spent three a long time within the subject, becoming very rich (his net well worth become estimated at more than $50 million in 2014), earlier than retiring as CEO of an insurance organization in 2011 to run for mayor, after which Congress, in New Jersey.

Like genuinely everyone else, he’s had studies on the alternative facet of medical health insurance corporations too. His mom died of cancer, without insurance, while MacArthur became simply 4 years antique; it took his dad years to repay the bills. His oldest daughter Grace, born with severe mental and bodily handicaps, gathered more than $1 million in the scientific bill before she died at age eleven.

It’s a testimony to just how poisonous MacArthur’s selection to assist Trump to push the AHCA thru the House was that, right here in his district, his impatient ingredients won’t even permit him to finish a tale about the death of his special wishes daughter before interrupting and urging him to take their questions on the Obamacare replacement invoice. “We’ve heard about your daughter! Get to the questions!” target audience participants shout. “Write a book!”

More than anything else, the components who’ve made it into the room – and MacArthur’s personnel checked to make sure they are constituents, even handing out labels identifying them as such – want to speak about single-payer. It’s the clear subject matter from the very start of the night, while a chant of “Single payer! Single payer!” broke out much less than ten minutes in, after MacArthur describes the Affordable Care Act as “collapsing.”

Derek Reichenbecher, a constituent with a coronary heart circumstance, is concerned what might occur to him if he misplaced his process and, with it, his coverage – growing an opening in coverage that, underneath the AHCA, could permit coverage companies to briefly deny him coverage, rate him sizeable rates or each.

“This is something this is very actual. This is my lifestyles. So while you talk approximately fitness care insurance like this – while you communicate about $8 billion to fund a high chance pool, and you say, ‘Don’t fear, you already have insurance,'” there are actual-world outcomes, he says, addressing MacArthur.

“Without fitness care coverage, I’m useless. I’m useless [or] bankrupt,” Reichenbecher says. “This is your modification, sir. With that amendment, you introduced [the AHCA] returned from the lifeless. It’s your’s; you very own it.”

The issue Reichenbecher defined might be a trouble for a “specific, narrow group of people,” MacArthur insists, emphasizing that he is worked to get the ones billions of greenbacks introduced to the plan to assist fund excessive-risk pools for human beings with pre-current conditions. (That money is doled out over five years, and is considered woefully insufficient to meet the level of need that would be created below the regulation.)

The electorate rejects that solution on its face. “It should not be a marketplace! My health care should not be a market,” one yells. “When did we emerge as a society that does not care approximately every other?” another shouts.

And: “I actually have family in Canada. They get coverage under the under authorities. They are sorted, and nobody has any court cases. … This is all approximately coverage groups earning money at our price!”

An hour-and-a-1/2 in, 92-year-antique Ruth Gage stands up in the back. “We’ve had this single-payer communique earlier than,” she reminds MacArthur. “You said, ‘Would I like a few bureaucrat in Washington to make decisions approximately my health care if we had single payer?’ And I stated, ‘What makes that anything worse than a few worker of a coverage employer?'”

MacArthur seems to her and says, earnestly, “I think there’s a distinction. What I even have located, in 30 years inside the private quarter, and now more than one years in the public region is that government bureaucrats can be very risky when they have power.”

The room erupts into grim gales of laughter. When it subsequently quiets down, MacArthur may be heard pronouncing, “I do not need a system where there may be nobody left to make decisions aside from federal bureaucrats – I assume it is a horrible mistake for this use. That’s my belief.”

A little later, a young black man stands up. He would not deliver his name; he simply says, “You’ve been speaking a lot approximately your parts on the alternative side of the Pine Barrens and the way they affect your policy choices. When are our ideas, on this side of the Pine Barrens, going to have an effect on your coverage choices? Everybody right here speaks approximately unmarried-payer, and you are nevertheless looking to push this different stuff on us, however we are the constituents – in case you want to head lower back [to D.C], in case you want another flip, you would possibly need to concentrate on what these humans have to say.”

As the night goes on, and MacArthur begins to get a take care of-of the room, a funny factor happens: He starts looking to promote the excessive-threat swimming pools his modification creates by means of likening them to a single-payer device.

Of the taxpayer-funded high-chance pools, MacArthur says, “it protects you, and it maintains all people else’s premiums lower priced. It’s now not that clean. I remember the fact that some other solution is unmarried-payer – I get that,” he acknowledges, approximately three hours in. “I think it is now not, in the end, a good solution for the American people, but I get that it’s far an answer. I’m seeking to supply a specific one.”

Geoff Ginter, carrying blue sanatorium scrubs, isn’t always buying it. “Health care isn’t always like shopping for whatever else. You can’t anticipate human beings to be excellent ‘clients’ of health care,” Ginter says. “You’re purported to be vetting docs and vetting hospitals and knowing what an MRI charges and knowing what a CT test costs and a cardiac catheterization – how a good deal does that value? And is the price extraordinary if I have this doctor or this doctor?”

“Health coverage as a for-profit commercial enterprise is immoral,” he bellows, because the whole room breaks into applause. “You want to make cash off of me. And the reason you [don’t want] to go to unmarried-payer is not due to the fact you don’t consider it,” Ginter adds, straining to be heard. “It’s due to the fact you understand the coverage companies have a powerful foyer and they’d decimate you.”

He finishes: “I have no value to a coverage organization. I can not do anything to their CEO, I can’t do something to their worker. Nothing. I can argue until I’m blue in the face. But a single-payer, run via the authorities? Yeah, it is were given troubles, however, it is also got elections, and you will discover that out in 2018.”

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