The Chicago-based international law firm Winston & Strawn LLP announced Wednesday that it is creating a gender-neutral parental leave policy, as well as a broader policy intended to help lawyers with the often hectic process of taking parental leave and then returning to work.
The policy includes 20 weeks of paid parental leave for associates and of counsel attorneys. It applies to parents of any gender and in any country, and the leave time can be taken in either one or two separate chunks within the first year of a child's life. Parents also aren't required to designate a "primary caregiver."
This is a pretty big deal in the legal industry, even if it falls somewhat short of the policies offered in other professions, according to Vivia Chen, a senior columnist at The American Lawyer. "Law firms are a bit behind other industries, especially the financial and other professional service industries, when it comes to more innovative family measures," she said.
Many tech firms, including Netflix, Facebook and Spotify, have introduced generous gender-neutral parental leave policies in recent months. Just a few weeks ago, the consulting firm EY announced a 16-week paid leave policy that will start in July. But Winston & Strawn is the first law firm to have a policy this expansive -- or at least the first to announce it publicly.
Getting women back to work after having kids -- and allowing men to take time off as well -- is a way for firms to help women ascend the career ladder. Currently, only 18 percent of equity partners in American law firms are women, even though women account for 47 percent of the country's J.D. degrees.
In addition to the 20 weeks of leave, the firm is also creating a few different ways to ease the transitions of taking leave and returning to work. There will be a "parental leave liaison" to assist people coming back to work, as well as career coaching services and lower billable-hour requirements for people who are just about to take leave or are just coming back to the firm.
"Traditionally for women, if you take a long leave, easing back in can be difficult. You might have hesitation about going back," Chen told The Huffington Post. Having someone act as a sort of coach, encouraging people to come back from leave, just might be the nudge new parents need to get back into the swing of things after having a baby.
To be clear, Winston & Strawn isn't acting altruistically here: The firm's move is intended to attract and retain high-level attorneys. Practice attorneys, who are low-level attorneys usually brought on for specific projects and who are outside the traditional partner-track framework of the firm, won't get the same 20-week benefit. Neither will the firm's other staff members, such as paralegals and office assistants.
However, it's relatively common for benefits in big law firms to be stratified, according to Chen. Winston & Strawn says its U.S. employees in lower positions will get increased paid leave time and an extra two weeks of paid time off.
Claire Underwood certainly would not stand being paid less than a man for the same work -- and neither did her real-life counterpart, Robin Wright.
The actor, who plays the formidable first lady on Netflix's "House of Cards," opened up about demanding higher pay in an interview at The Rockefeller Foundation on Tuesday.
Until recently, Wright was paid less than her co-star Kevin Spacey, who was reportedly making $500,000 per episode on the show. The fourth season of the drama was just released on Netflix in March.
“I was looking at statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on that moment. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public,’” Wright said, flashing her trademark smile. “And they did.”
Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin had asked her about the barriers women face in getting ahead, and Wright mentioned the gender pay gap. In 2015, women still make just 79 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. The gap is worse for women of color.
Their conversation was part of a series called “Insight Dialogues,” discussions with thought leaders and activists hosted in New York. The Huffington Post is a media partner with The Rockefeller Foundation on the series.
The pay gap is so pernicious that women earn less than men in 439 major occupations, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Watch Wright's interview here (she mentions her demands for equal pay around 7:15):
Wright said that one of the things holding women back is the time out they take to raise children, mentioning that her career took a hit after she had her kids in the '90s -- just as she was gaining fame after starring roles in "The Princess Bride" and "Forrest Gump."
“Because I wasn’t working full time, I wasn’t building my salary bracket. If you don’t build salary bracket with notoriety and presence, then you’re not in the game anymore," Wright said.
Her kids are apparently doing their part to help her catch up. Last year, Wright's daughter, Dylan Penn, told Marie Claire that it was "crazy" her mother wasn't making the same as her co-star: "They both equally grab the attention of the audience."
Women in Hollywood have been speaking up more about equal pay ever since Patricia Arquette called for equality in her acceptance speech at the Oscars last year. Arquette, who was accepting an award for her role in the film "Boyhood," has since lost out on a couple of roles for taking a stand, she said earlier this year at a dinner in Beverly Hills, California, that The Huffington Post attended.
Still, since she spoke up, others have followed, including Jennifer Lawrence and Gillian Jacobs.
And judging from the Twittersphere, a lot of women are excited about this turn of events. Many were celebrating Wright's salary win on Tuesday and Wednesday.
That's what I'm talking about Claire Underwood. https://t.co/6xZwOmwIMQ via @EmilyRPeck @HuffPostBiz pic.twitter.com/FS7UASSkst
Around 21 percent of U.S. executives or senior officials at Goldman Sachs Group Inc <GS.N> are women, according to statistics published Thursday as part of the bank's annual Environmental, Social and Governance Report.
That percentage is below the 29 percent national average of senior officials in U.S. finance and insurance who are women, according to the most recent data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Women made up 48 percent of midlevel officials and managers in the United States within finance and insurance, compared with 26 percent at Goldman.
Asked to comment on the 21 percent figure, a Goldman spokesman said: "Goldman Sachs is committed to fostering a work environment that values diverse backgrounds and perspectives."
Around 37 percent of total U.S. employees at Goldman are women, the report said.
In 2015, Goldman said a quarter of its new managing directors that year were women, the highest percentage in the bank's history.
The bank has several efforts in place to retain female employees, including a program that helps those who have left the workforce for two or more years to restart their careers and a six-month initiative aimed at developing third- and second-year associates.
(Reporting by Olivia Oran in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
GOOCHLAND COUNTY, Virginia — Ever since Curtis Brown Jr. got his first Star Wars toy as a toddler, he has been fascinated by action figures. So much so that he has built a business customizing action figures for clients worldwide. But what could be a lucrative career has turned into an exercise in futility that traps Brown and his family in poverty.
That’s because Brown struggles every day with miserable Internet service. The only choice where he currently lives is an $80-a-month satellite connection. It’s slow and comes with such a low data cap that he exceeds it within a week or two. So Brown’s business comes to a halt. He can’t afford to buy more data. He can’t use his smartphone because the service is so bad he has to go outside to get a signal, and it’s too cumbersome to update the many websites he uses to conduct his business.
The constant interruptions limit Brown to about $400 a month in profit. Even with his wife Ashley’s income from an administrative job with the state's education department, Brown and his three stepchildren have to rely on help from relatives and food stamps to make ends meet. Brown would move if he could, but houses with fast Internet connections are in areas where the rent is too expensive.
An isolated case? Not at all. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that even though Internet access has improved in recent years, families in poor areas are almost five times more likely not to have access to high-speed broadband than the most affluent American households. That means no access to online jobs, and no access to health care advice, education, government services and banking — everything needed to be a full participant in today’s society. This harsh reality has led to a new kind of segregation.
“Internet access,” says James Lane, superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools, “is the civil rights issue of our time.”
A Rope Ladder
Brown sells his custom action figures — Gamorrean Guards, Luke Skywalkers and Skeletors — out of his living room in a compact one-story brick house at the end of a dirt driveway just off Stokes Station Road in the western part of Goochland County. The neighborhood is about 20 miles west of the tony suburbs and manicured golf courses adjacent to Richmond — but it is worlds away. Next door to the Browns: an abandoned trailer home with broken windows and rusted siding.
Nearly every house in the area has a satellite dish bolted on the roof or perched on a pole in the yard. A satellite connection, like the one Brown gets from HughesNet, is the only option for Internet here. But it is expensive and doesnot provide what the federal government defines as “advanced telecommunications capability” or high-speed broadband, a download speed of 25 megabits per second or higher. That’s the speed both the feds and application developers say is the minimum needed to support both the numerous devices in a household today and the future applications that will create digitally interconnected homes and businesses.
Allan Holmes/Center for Public IntegrityCurtis Brown Jr.'s home in Goochland, Virginia.
Other Internet connections like DSL — offered by companies such as AT&T Inc., CenturyLink Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. — rely on telephone lines but typically don’t offer broadband speeds. Americans can get Internet on their smart phones, but the faster connections on those phones aren’t widely available and come with data caps that most people use up quickly. Cable and fiber connections, those offered by Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Verizon’s fiber-optic cable service mostly in cities, offer the faster speeds. But they aren’t available everywhere either — especially in low-income areas.
It’s that sort of fast cable or fiber connection that Brown says he needs to earn thousands of dollars more a month like he used to when he lived in another part of the county that had a fast connection —before a family matter caused financial difficulties and he had to move.
“It would be like when you are in a hole, it would be that nice rope ladder being lowered down to you so you can get yourself out,” Brown said. “That’s exactly what it would feel like for us.”
For now, though, that ladder lies just out of reach, less than five miles away on River Road, one of the main thoroughfares that roughly follows the James River, which flows east to and through Richmond. That’s where Comcast, the high-speed broadband provider for much of Goochland County, ends its high-speed Internet service. It also happens to be almost exactly where the median household income drops by more than a third and the poverty rate triples, according to the Center’s analysis.
That’s not the only place Comcast ends service at the doorstep of this low-income area. The same happens on Riddles Bridges Road just another two miles away. And again farther north on Forest Grove Road, where Comcast serves neighborhoods with $300,000-plus homes: service stops a few thousand feet before the line where poor neighborhoods start — such as a low-income black community a little more than a mile away. Here Internet access “is nonexistent,” said a young resident who declined to give his name. “It’s primitive out here.”
Internet providers say they don’t consider demographic data such as income levels and poverty rates when deciding where to hook up neighborhoods. Who gets a wired Internet connection and who doesn’t is one mostly based on population density, they say. Areas like where the Browns live are too sparsely populated for telecommunications companies to make a return on the high cost of wiring rural neighborhoods, they say. Comcast officials add that they are following a specific franchise agreement the company negotiated with Goochland County officials, which requires them to lay cable down streets only where there are 30 houses per mile.
Even so, it’s hard for Manuel Alvarez, a county supervisor who represents the district where the Browns live, to look at where Internet service ends and not wonder if Comcast purposefully avoids providing broadband to Goochland County’s poor.
“I can't believe that they wouldn't look at people's ability to pay before they run cable,” said Alvarez, who won a seat on the board in 2011 running on a platform to improve Internet access countywide. “I do believe that they run cable where they will get their money back.”
Not Even a Choice
Nationwide, families in neighborhoods with median household incomes below $34,800 — the lowest fifth of neighborhoods nationally — are five times more likely not to have access to broadband than households in areas with a median income above $80,700 — the top fifth, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation. The Center, which analyzed Federal Communications Commission and Census Bureau data, specifically looked at households that didn’t have access to wired broadband, which is fast Internet service that is readily available, as opposed to adoption, when a household has access to service and can choose to purchase it or not.
In Houston, high-speed Internet service becomes patchy between Interstate-69 and the Westpark Tollway, skipping clusters of apartment complexes where the median household income is less than $30,000 a year. Wealthier neighborhoods to the north, south and west enjoy more consistent coverage. Low-income residents in an area in East Cleveland don’t have access while wealthy areas just two miles away to the south do, according to the Center’s analysis. And in San Bernardino, California, people living in areas that have the lowest fifth of household income are about three times as likely to not have access to broadband as families living in areas where the household income is in the top fifth.
In all, in excess of 30 million Americans, more than half in areas with a median household income below $47,000 a year, do not have access to broadband, according to the Center’s analysis. That means difficulty streaming video or downloading or posting large files such as graphics and photographs, as Brown experiences. If more than one person in a household is online, interruptions can occur. And these families won’t be able to take advantage of future applications, such as home health care apps, that may require fast speeds to work properly.
“Internet access is the civil rights issue of our time.”James Lane, superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools
The Center’s findings closely match the FCC’s conclusion in its Broadband Progress Report, released in January. (The Center used more recent data that was released after the agency published its findings.) The FCC’s report was the basis for a commission ruling the same month that Internet providers weren’t deploying broadband in a reasonable and timely fashion, as required by law, opening up the possibility the agency may impose regulations to require providers to upgrade and expand their networks faster.
Compounding Difficulties
Many broadband experts and analysts say the real explanation for the difference in Internet access between the rich and poor is that providers can’t afford to wire rural areas, which have a larger proportion of low-income families than urban areas. Wiring rural areas is expensive, and providers can’t get enough return on investment because there are too few households to support the cost. Low-income households also tend to sign up for Internet service at less than half the rate of wealthier families, with the high cost of broadband connections the primary deterrent, according to the Pew Research Center. The providers are businesses, after all, goes the argument, and those businesses have the right to make money, and choose where to do business based on whether they can make a profit there or not. Last year, Comcast earned almost $12 billion in net operating income on its cable communications business.
The Center found that even controlling for population density, the rural poor are still in excess of one-and-a-half times as likely not to have high-speed broadband as rural wealthy families. Even in urban areas where 94 percent of households have access, low-income families are three times as likely not to have access as the wealthiest urban families, the Center found.
Eleanor Bell Fox/Center for Public IntegrityJames Lane, superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools.
Tanisha Fletcher is one of the nearly 7 percent of city residents who don’t have access. Fletcher, 36, is a resident of Juniper Gardens, one of the oldest public housing projects in Kansas City, Kansas. Time Warner Cable provides service for the buildings all around her block, but not for her apartment building, according to the FCC broadband database. Fletcher, 36, has to rely on a wireless connection that she said freezes so often that “it might as well be non-existent.”
Even though Fletcher earns just $1,100 a month as the office manager at Connecting for Good, a nonprofit that works with Internet providers to connect low-income areas, she said she would be willing to pay $20 or more a month for a connection so she could finish her college degree and stay in touch with family and friends.
“We kind of get looked over here, and I don’t really know why that it is,” Fletcher said. “It makes us feel like the cable company and the city just don’t care about us.”
Time Warner Cable did not respond to a request for comment.
The FCC maintains that disproportionate access between low- and high-income Americans is a top concern. The FCC said policies directed toward improving access in rural areas, like its rural healthcare fund, and a fund to connect schools and libraries are aimed at reducing the wealthy-poor divide. The FCC additionally says it imposes conditions in mergers between telecommunications companies that typically require a purchasing company to provide better access to the poor, such as with AT&T’s purchase of satellite provider DirectTV last year. And the FCC also has acted to reduce barriers to broadband expansion into unserved areas, as it did in preempting two state laws that prevented cities from expanding municipal-owned Internet networks, arguing the statutes limited broadband’s reach to rural areas and the poor.
“A lot of people say, well life is unfair, but I feel like there's a difference between unfair and the necessity of it.”Crystal Ware, mother of a fifth grader who doesn’t have Internet access at home
But not explicitly focusing on the digital divide between the wealthy and the poor can have significant adverse circumstances, said Sharon Strover, director of the Technology and Information Policy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies broadband’s impact on economic growth. .
In a 2013 study, Strover and her co-authors found that poverty rates in areas with a high-speed connection were significantly lower than those that didn’t have broadband. Median incomes also were higher in counties where adoption rates were above average.
“I think some of the difficulties that lower-income folks have now will just be compounded” if they don’t have access to high-speed broadband, Strover said.
The Digital Dividing Line
In Goochland, county leaders and residents are well aware that broadband access ends at the same place where incomes drop, and the poverty rate and percentage of minorities increase.
The wealthy area starts in the eastern part of the county, which abuts some of the most luxurious Richmond suburbs, where the median income is above $100,000 a year. Million dollar-plus estates with waterfront views sit close by to the exclusive private Kinloch Golf Club, with its Tudor-style clubhouse. Capital One Financial Corp., the eighth-largest U.S. bank, operates a sprawling 316-acre business campusabout a five-minute drive away. Residents here have a choice of buying Internet service from Comcast or Verizon, with speeds reaching as high as 500 Mbps, among some of the fastest available nationwide.
Eleanor Bell Fox/Center for Public IntegrityManuel Alvarez, a Goochland county supervisor.
But travel west and cross the halfway point of the county — past the recently built Goochland High School and just beyond Dogtown Road — and broadband mostly stops. No longer can you get Comcast’s fastest connection of 150 Mbps, and Verizon’s fastest speed drops from the 500 Mbps in the east to a sluggish 3 Mbps, to eventually no service at all. For sure, the county is more rural here, making it more costly for providers to lay cable or fiber, acknowledges Lane, the school superintendent.
At the same time, he says, “We know that in our community the fiber stops right at the moment where our low-income students are living.”
And the effects, he says, are profound. Three years ago, the school system began giving a laptop or iPad to each student. Teachers incorporate the devices into classroom exercises; in one recent class students searched the Internet to find requirements for their chosen careers. Teachers also would like to assign homework that requires accessing online resources when students leave school. But because many students have no broadband at home, the school has implemented a rule that teachers can’t assign homework that depends on the Internet. Even so, students without Internet are falling behind, Lane said.
“The kids who have access are learning anytime, anywhere they want to,” said Lane, who will become the superintendent of schools for neighboring Chesterfield County in July. “But the kids who don't have access at home, basically their learning stops at the moment they leave the school house.”
Like Cody Ware. A 12-year-old fifth-grader at Goochland’s Byrd Elementary School who likes science, Cody said the lack of Internet makes him nervous because he is afraid he may miss an assignment. “If I forget to take a picture of my homework on the iPad, then I can't do it on the iPad later that night because I don't have it,” he said. “And then I have to explain to my teachers why I didn't have it.”
Cody’s mother, Crystal, 38, said the family can’t afford to move to the part of the county with broadband access, even though it’s just a couple miles away. She recently had to make the hour-long, round-trip drive to the closest library so her son could download a study guide for an upcoming science test.
“A lot of people say, well life is unfair, but I feel like there's a difference between unfair and the necessity of it,” Ware said.
‘Bent on Regulating’
The FCC has the authority to determine if providers are deploying Internet service in a “reasonable and timely fashion,” as outlined in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. When the agency sees barriers to deployment, it has argued it can act in the public interest, as it did when it preempted the state laws barring cities from expanding their networks.
But the market for Internet service remains close to a monopoly in many places, and at best a duopoly in most areas. About 75 percent Americans have only one or two choices for providers, according to the FCC. And many providers tend to avoid competition that could lead to expansion of the networks, according to an earlier Center investigation.
When the FCC ruled that broadband wasn’t being deployed fast enough, it reported that “deployment, competition, and adoption [are] concepts that we continue to recognize are tightly linked.” But Internet providers such as AT&T and Verizon argued the opposite. They said the FCC’s own reporting showed the percentage of Americans without wired broadband access dropped from 28 percent in 2011 to 10 percent in 2014.
AT&T said in a filing that the FCC was “ignoring that this percentage was declining rapidly.” Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, voted against the FCC’s finding that broadband was not being deployed fast enough. He said the FCC’s report “continues to show steady progress in connecting unserved Americans” and that “apparently no amount of progress will ever be good enough for a Commission that is bent on regulating broadband at all cost.”
Verizon claimed in a filing that the FCC should include wireless access in its assessment of broadband access, arguing the failure to incorporate “all broadband options that are available to and used by consumers was a persistent flaw in methodology.”
But the FCC also ruled in January that satellite and wireless connections were not a substitute for wired connections.
And back in Goochland County, most folks seem to agree. Superintendent Lane called O’Rielly’s assertion “ridiculous” and said Verizon’s claim that wireless should be considered in the broadband-access calculations isn’t feasible.
“Do you think that you could do your entire job on your cell phone?” asked Lane. “Because I can tell you that most people would say that you cannot.”
“We want to service as many people as possible.”Comcast Corp. official
Comcast officials said they do not use Census Bureau income or poverty data to determine where the company lays cable. Comcast conducts periodic surveys of the county to check where they need to provide service. Officials also said the company’s program to provide low-cost Internet connections is aimed at increasing adoption, although it doesn’t improve access to broadband. By serving urban areas, “arguably we provide service to more families in poverty or near poverty,” a Comcast official said. “We want to service as many people as possible.”
In Goochland County, similar to other areas, the company is obligated to follow a franchise agreement it negotiated with the county in 2011. These agreements, which number in the thousands nationwide, are typically renegotiated every several years. In Goochland County, that is a time when residents fill up the room where the board of supervisors meet to complain about lack of service, Alvarez said, but local boards typically don’t have a lot of power to negotiate expanded service into areas that are high-cost, which frequently also means low-income.
AT&T and Verizon, as well as Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink and Charter Communications Inc., didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Cox Communications Inc., which provides service in more than a dozen states from Rhode Island to California, said in an email that “100% of the residents in the markets we serve have access to Internet service if they choose it” and that the company follows agreements negotiated with local governments.
The Cost of Access
In many areas where Comcast runs cable, residents don’t have broadband access. Under its agreement, Comcast isn’t obligated to run a line from the street down a homeowner’s or renter’s driveway if the house sits more than 150 feet off the road.
The provision keeps even wealthier Goochland residents from getting connected. When Alvarez, the county supervisor, moved in 2004 to a Goochland neighborhood where many of the homes are valued at more than $500,000, he didn’t have fixed Internet, even though a cable ran down the road a few hundred feet from his driveway in the Mill Forest subdivision. Alvarez said local Comcast officials told him it would cost $2,300 to run a cable to his house and $250,000 to wire the entire neighborhood of more than 120 homes. Eventually, Comcast came down to $47,000 for the subdivision, or about $450 a house, Alvarez said. Most of the neighborhood residents paid the fee to get connected.
Alvarez, whose district he says includes “houses with dirt floors to houses with marble floors,” said Comcast and other providers should pay to connect homes where lines are readily available because the companies will eventually recoup their costs. He says the lack of Internet is also hurting job growth in the western part of the county, as businesses can’t get the fast speeds needed to compete in the modern economy.
Center for Public Integrity
What it all means, Alvarez asserts, is that high-speed Internet is really a “must have” in today’s world, not a luxury. The Internet is becoming a utility that is as much of a necessity as electricity, and that means the federal government may have to regulate it as one, he said.
“Then you can push for more coverage,” Alvarez said. Otherwise, he says, “Everybody who doesn't have high-speed Internet is going to fall behind.”
A Lifeline?
Last month the FCC passed reforms to a program that officials said should encourage providers to expand broadband to low-income areas. In a party-line vote, the agency voted 3-2 to expand the Lifeline program, which previously had subsidized the cost of cell phones for low-income individuals, to include fixed Internet service. Eligible participants can receive a $9.25 a month discount off their fixed broadband bill, paid for by the FCC. Officials hope the $2.25 billion program, funded by the existing universal service tax on customers’ Internet bills, will create a market in poor areas that Internet providers will want to reach.
FCC officials note that the agency’s $4 billion-a-year “high-cost” universal service program also includes subsidies to encourage wiring areas underserved by providers. The $1.7 billion Connect America Fund requires providers who accept money to offer a speed of at least 10 Mbps download as well as follow other requirements. But not all providers have accepted the cash. Verizon was offered $29 million in federal funds to expand service in Virginia, including about $265,000 in Goochland, but it didn’t take the money, according to the FCC. Other providers did, such as CenturyLink. Verizon didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“I can't believe that they wouldn't look at people's ability to pay before they run cable.”Manuel Alvarez, member of Goochland County’s Board of Supervisors
But some are skeptical of how much these programs will help. It is unlikely Lifeline will provide a big enough incentive to providers to upgrade networks or to expand wired service to poor areas.
Lifeline’s individual subsidy “is unlikely to make a dent in the under-supply of broadband in sparsely populated rural areas,” said Richard Bennett, who studies technology policy at the American Enterprise Institute, in an email. “Solutions to the extreme rural coverage dilemma are more likely to come from advances in technology and investment by public-private partnerships to bring new technologies … to market.”
Bennett said wireless broadband companies such as Bluebird Broadband, which offers service with no data caps, are likely one option for low-income households going forward. Bluebird Broadband, which services Northwest Louisiana and neighboring parts of Texas, offers a 20 Mbps package for about $89 a month, including a $9 router rental fee. That’s still more costly than most wired connections with faster speeds.
In Virginia, Last Mile Broadband LLC has begun to deploy an advanced wireless LTE technology to serve portions of Hanover County, just north of Goochland, that it says is faster and more reliable than current wireless technology. The company plans to cover Goochland County by the end of 2017. The company will offer speeds of 10 Mbps at about $80 a month, after a $199 fee to install equipment on a customer’s home, without any data caps.
“We’re going where no other company serves,” said Keith McMichael, Last Mile’s chief operating officer, who grew up in the area. “We’re trying to solve everyone’s problem. Low income or high income, everyone gets it the same way.”
But the cost may still be out of reach for low-income families, and the service doesn’t include TV or phone, requiring families to pay for a TV or satellite package with another company. Most providers that offer a wired broadband connection of 25 Mbps or more charge less per month and include phone and TV. Besides, the wireless companies are still in startup mode and have yet to spend the money to expand coverage.
Back in Goochland, Brown, the toy maker, says he can’t wait much longer.
“Our kids need this,” Brown said. “If wealthy people have better access, they're going to have more opportunities, which will increase their potential for wealth. While if you are in poverty and you have reduced access, you're going to basically fall further behind.”
CORRECTION, May 12, 2016, 4:22 p.m.:An earlier version of this article identified Ashley Brown as working for the Goochland County department of education. She works for the Virginia Department of Education.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting organization. Verizon is the parent company of AOL, which owns The Huffington Post.
Pension funds are putting pressure on ExxonMobil to start telling its shareholders how climate change will affect the oil giant’s business.
The California public employee pension fund and the New York City pension fund, which together manage $433 billion in investments, told fellow shareholders in a letter to support a resolution calling for the company to disclose in detail how it could be harmed by new government policies limiting carbon emissions and other shifts due to climate change.
ExxonMobil, hurting from low oil prices, was recently stripped of the top credit rating by Standard & Poor’s for the first time since the 1930s. The company has also been dogged by reporting from the Los Angeles Times and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism showing that it knew for far longer than it publicly acknowledged that climate change was caused by emissions from burning fossil fuels.
In a letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and CalPERs Investment Director Anne Simpson said, “We believe investors would benefit from an assessment of Exxon Mobil’s oil and gas reserves under a scenario consistent with the global emissions reduction target defined in The Paris Agreement.” The agreement asks countries to commit to keeping climate change below 2 degrees Celsius.
On Wednesday, a group of about 1,000 academics signed a letter supporting the ExxonMobile resolution, along with a similar measure at Chevron.
ExxonMobil's board does not support the resolution and fought unsuccessfully to have it dismissed by the SEC. Asked for comment, ExxonMobil spokesman Scott Silvestri referred The Huffington Post to the company's proxy statement, which argues against the resolution.
In its annual report released in February, the company included a limited recognition that “governments will enact policies that impose rising costs on energy‑related CO2emissions.” ExxonMobil also said in the report that it assumes carbon emissions will be priced at $80 per ton in 20 years. Currently, there is no stated, national price on carbon in the U.S., but some states have implemented carbon pricing plans, and hundreds of companies are using internal carbon prices to make investment decisions.
U.S. companies are not currently required to disclose climate change risks to investors. Global regulators are examining a set of voluntary guidelines to standardize disclosure of climate risks.
In April, the company told HuffPost that its climate disclosure is adequate. “ExxonMobil believes the risk of climate change is real and warrants action. ExxonMobil is taking action by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations, helping consumers reduce their emissions, supporting research and participating in constructive dialogue on policy options,” said spokesman Alan Jeffers.
Hillary Clinton has a $30 billion, 4,300-word plan to retrain coal workers that covers everything from education and infrastructure to tax credits and school funding.
Donald Trump’s coal plan is a duckface thumbs-up in a miner’s hard hat and a rant about hair spray, President Barack Obama and China. The specifics of his plan to put coal miners back to work, David Gutman reported in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, are that he’d put coal miners back to work. That’s it.
And Trump is the candidate who won the West Virginia Coal Association’s endorsement ahead of Tuesday's West Virginia presidential primary.
“Trump is a successful businessman. He is committed to success," the trade association's senior vice president, Chris Hamilton, told The Huffington Post.
“Hillary’s plan is akin to somebody running you over, then offering to pick you up,” he said. “It’s not a plan. It’s a care package.”
What Trump’s anger has that Clinton’s policy lacks is a villain. In Trump’s telling, the coal industry is hurting because of excessive safety and environmental regulations imposed by Obama's Environmental Protection Agency. It’s a simple story that Trump can promise out-of-work coal miners he will reverse.
“Because Obama and the EPA are a focal point, they now have an easy explanation for why they’re in trouble, why they have lost their jobs,” Robert Rupp, political science professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College, told the Financial Times. “And surprise, surprise, what is Trump promising? He’s promising that it’s all Obama’s fault and they’re going to open up the mines.”
Fact-checking Trump is a fool’s errand, but as viscerally satisfying as it is to say Obama killed coal, it isn’t true. The coal industry is killing itself, with debt it loaded up to fund deals that would only be profitable if Chinese demand for steel-making coal continued to surge. That was just before demand tanked. At the same time, coal has been battered by competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy, HuffPost's Kate Sheppard reported.
In other words, the coal industry is imploding. Peabody Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, and Patriot Coal have filed for bankruptcy in recent months -- hurt by cleaner competition but also because of the industry's own mistakes. And the decline in coal jobs has been a decades-long trend. In 1985, the industry employed 177,000 people. By the end of 2008, that number had been whittled to just 86,000. Now it's just 56,000.
Clinton’s plan starts by putting the coal industry in the context of cheaper renewable energy and natural gas, climate change, and the negative health effects of mining and burning coal. Her rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), focuses on the shrinking number of well-paying jobs in coal country, and wants to spend $41 billion on things like worker benefits, clean energy and infrastructure. Both Clinton and Sanders clearly see the benefits of an economy that uses far less coal and employs far fewer people to mine it.
And both Democratic candidates' policies acknowledge that coal workers and communities shouldn’t be punished anymore than they have because they work in a dirty, dangerous industry.
That isn’t always the message Clinton delivers. She was forced to apologize for saying that she would bring renewable energy to coal country and “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
“The Clinton plan is consistent in what we need to do and is in keeping with what other countries around the world are doing,” Edward Cameron, a policy lead at the nonprofit corporate environmental coalition We Mean Business, told HuffPost. “Even as we transition away from coal, we need to protect and safeguard coal communities by giving them different types of livelihood options than before.”
Still, Cameron said the success of Clinton’s plan would depend heavily on the West Virginia officials tasked with executing it.
“I have enough experience traveling around the world over the last 20 years or so working on international development to see that the places that transition well are the places with solid local government,” Cameron said.
Vox’s David Roberts, writing about Clinton's energy plan as a whole, pointed out that, “for better or worse, Clinton resists the call for policy moonshots. She wants a plan that can be implemented within the bounds of foreseeable political reality.”
Just try winning over a crowd of out-of-work coal miners with that line.
The Obama administration announced Friday that it will begin cracking down on common money laundering and tax evasion schemes in the aftermath of the Panama Papers leaks.
The Panama Papers, a trove of 11.5 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in early April, revealed the true owners of thousands of shell corporations set up by the law firm. Keeping money offshore is not always illegal, but is often done to avoid having to pay taxes on it back home.
What is less well-known is that the U.S. is itself a tax haven, with plenty of loopholes in the tax code to make its wealthiest citizens perfectly happy to park their money at home.
Obama said in a speech Friday he wants to change that.
.@POTUS just took a series of steps to combat money laundering, corruption, and tax evasion: https://t.co/vzff5yGpjT https://t.co/dyT4hEa4LV
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 6, 2016
While fully closing tax loopholes requires an act of Congress, the president outlined some ways the executive branch is working to do its part.
"It would make sure that families and small businesses who don't have fancy lawyers and fancy accountants are being treated the same as big corporations who do," Obama said in his speech Friday.
"In recent months we've seen just how big a problem corruption and tax evasion have become around the globe," he said.
"Combatting this kind of tax evasion and strengthening the global financial system have been priorities of mine since I took office, and they're part of our broader ongoing efforts to make sure that the rules aren't rigged and our economy works for everybody."
On Thursday, the Treasury Department announced a new rule that requires banks and other financial institutions to "collect and verify the personal information of the real people (also known as beneficial owners) who own, control, and profit from companies when those companies open accounts."
The White House's short explainer on the topic notes that "while the beneficial owners of shell companies often exploit weak rules in offshore tax havens, gaps also exist in U.S. tax rules that foreigners can currently exploit to set up and hide their assets or financial activity in an anonymous shell company in the United States."
