Yet in the 116 years since it was written, and after all of the efforts to modernize the document — many of those efforts aimed at revising or eliminating racist language — these racist words still reside in the document:
The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial “gold standard” in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,Related reading:
- 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World.
And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.
- 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.
But documents Flynn filed this week with the Justice Department raised fresh questions about his ties to the Turkish government, even as he was serving as top adviser to Trump's presidential campaign. His now-shuttered firm, Flynn Intel Group, earned $530,000 last year for work on behalf of Inovo BV, a Dutch firm, whose Turkish founder has ties to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As part of its contract, the firm undertook research into an Erdogan political opponent, Fetulleh Gulen, an Islamic cleric who lives in exile in rural Pennsylvania.
It’s not about Pruitt, it’s about the Republican Party. My inbox is groaning with statements from previous EPA administrators, scientists, nonprofits, members of Congress, and assorted others, condemning Pruitt’s ignorance in florid terms. But they are all about what Pruitt believes. And in the end, who cares what he believes? He is a functionary, chosen in part to dismantle EPA regulations on greenhouse gases. If it weren’t him, it would be some other functionary.
Minimum wage increases last year in 17 states and Washington, D.C., helped raise pay among the lowest-paid workers, the EPI found. Pay increases for the poorest 10 percent of workers were more than twice as high in states where the minimum wage rose as in states where it did not.
At the start of 2017, minimum wages rose again in 19 states, a trend that might have helped raise pay last month. [Plus Maryland and Oregon on July 1, 2017)
