<p style="margin-top: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Verdana; vertical-align: baseline;">by Fred Kammer, SJ</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Verdana; vertical-align: baseline;">On July 24, 2014, U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released a discussion draft entitled Expanding Opportunity in America. That report observed, &ldquo;Poverty is too high, unemployment is too high, labor-force participation is too low, and wage growth is too slow.&rdquo;[1] The report&rsquo;s proposals for expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, education reform, and criminal justice reform merit careful consideration. However, the draft&rsquo;s first chapter&mdash;&ldquo;reforming the safety net&rdquo;&mdash;re-hashes ideas that will worsen poverty and erode what remains of the safety net. <a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/JSQ Fall 2014 Another Misleading Proposal_1.pdf">MORE&gt;&gt;&nbsp;</a></p>

<p>by: Jeremy Relph,&nbsp;<em>Business Insider Australia&nbsp;</em></p>
<p>On a Saturday morning in late August 2013, 10-year-old Daniel Chacon awoke early. It was hot, as mornings often are in Bordos de Agua Azul, his neighbourhood in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. His family was poor, barely scraping together a living by selling pickled vegetables on the roadside.</p>
<p>Daniel and his 14-year-old brother insisted on contributing as best they could. They&rsquo;d managed to talk their parents into renting a horse and buggy, which they used to collect discarded boxes, selling the cardboard to recycling collectors for pennies a pound.</p>
<p>It may have seemed like a tedious job, but there was an element of risk to the task because of an unfortunate characteristic of the area: Since 2011, San Pedro Sula has been the world&rsquo;s most murderous city. (Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, holds the No. 4 spot.) Children fleeing these horrors have recently become a political issue in the US, where they are increasingly turning up in search of asylum and safety. But Daniel and his brother are among those who stayed.</p>
<p>Occasionally during their rounds, they&rsquo;d split up to cover more ground, taking turns leaving the cart to scout for boxes on foot. At 2 p.m., Daniel&rsquo;s brother was making his way back to the cart through the crowded streets of the Medina neighbourhood when shots rang out. Police sped by on motorcycles.</p>
<p>By the time he arrived, Daniel was dead.</p>
<p>&ldquo;He got shot,&rdquo; a bystander told him. &ldquo;They took him to the hospital.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Sadly, the slaying of a child for no discernible reason is hardly a noteworthy event in Honduras, where there are on average some 19 homicides reported every day. In San Pedro Sula, residents are murdered at the annual rate of 169 per 100,000 residents, a staggering figure that dwarfs the US leader, Flint, Michigan, where the murder rate is 62 for every 100,000.</p>
<p>While the Obama administration struggles to get a handle on the problem &mdash; having recently instituted a &ldquo;get tough&rdquo; detention policy designed to slow the influx of families seeking asylum &mdash; children like Daniel Chacon are caught in the crossfire every day.</p>
<p>In an effort to understand what life is like in the world&rsquo;s murder capital, we spent 2 weeks in San Pedro Sula. We found a city in crisis, but also a place steeped in hope, where the circus still comes to town, the local crime reporter struggles with an overwhelming task, and life goes on &mdash; until it doesn&rsquo;t.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/murder-capital-san-pedro-sula-2014-10">MORE&gt;&gt;&nbsp;</a></p>

<p><em><span class="intro">Addressing the Catholic Finance Association in New York City: October 7, 2014. &nbsp;</span></em></p>
<p><span class="intro">I am happy to come to this conversation not only as a Jesuit priest, but also as a proud graduate of the Wharton School of Business. To establish some bona fides, I was a finance major at Wharton, took a job in the Financial Management Program at General Electric in New York City, which was then the International Finance and Accounting headquarters of GE, worked after my training program for a year in international accounting, and then took a job running the FMP program at GE Capital in Stamford, Connecticut, and finally moved into human resources. &nbsp;So I come before you as someone who knows that business is a real vocation, who still has many friends in business (and specifically in finance) and who also knows that business is a real way to contribute to the common good.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span class="intro">So I approach our discussion of executive compensation from a financial point of view and a human resource point of view, but also, of course, from a Catholic point of view. You will hear a lot about the financial perspective and the human resource perspective tonight from our other distinguished participants, but I think what I might be able to contribute is the Catholic perspective.</span></p>
<p><span class="intro">The Catholic perspective on salaries, compensation and labor is the Christian perspective in general, and the basis of that is always the Gospels. You all know what Jesus commands us in the Gospels, and, we might say even more accurately, invites us to: Love our neighbor. Pray for those who persecute you. Forgive someone seventy times seven times. And of course care for the poor. Jesus is born into a poor family in a poor town, he works as a carpenter, which at the time would&#39;ve been seen as a very low-class occupation (below the peasantry, since the carpenter did not have the benefit of a stable plot of land), he sees the disparities between the rich and poor in his own lifetime, and he constantly pointed us to the poor and the marginalized in his public ministry. &nbsp;So this is the Christian perspective. <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/too-much-ceo-compensation-and-catholic-social-teaching?utm_source=Main+Reader+List&amp;utm_campaign=b06f611613-July+18_The_Week_at_Commonweal&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_407bf353a2-b06f611613-91268989">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></span></p>
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<p><a href="http://www.loyno.edu/news/story/2014/10/8/3513">James Martin, SJ will headline Loyola&rsquo;s Presidential Guest Series Saturday, Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. His talk will be followed by a book signing.</a></p>

<p><span class="intro">by Sue Weishar, Ph.D.</span></p>
<p><span class="intro">&nbsp; &nbsp; How is it that in Louisiana, a state with a rapidly diminishing coastline, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a crumbling infrastructure, &ldquo;amnesty&rdquo; for &ldquo;illegal aliens&rdquo; is the issue dominating political ads in the U.S. Senate race? This in the same state that announced a <a href="http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/louisiana/2014/09/22/la-tax-amnesty-collections-expected-harder/16060881/">tax amnesty</a> for delinquent taxpayers on September 12. In April the <a href="http://www.wwl.com/pages/18909240.php?">New Orleans Municipal Court </a>announced an amnesty plan to encourage thousands of residents to come to court to avoid being arrested on outstanding misdemeanor warrants. Amnesty is a time-tested public policy strategy to clean the slate and give people a fresh start. Why has &ldquo;amnesty&rdquo; for undocumented immigrants become such a dirty word?&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span class="intro">&nbsp; &nbsp; Anyone with a working set of eyeballs could see that Latino workers were essential to the state&rsquo;s recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. Although at the time no one was very interested in asking about the legal status of the workers doing the dirty, dangerous work of digging south Louisiana out of the smelly gray muck that blanketed the region, researchers from <a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/rebuilding_after_katrina.pdf">Tulane and Berkeley</a> universities did inquire. They found that half the reconstruction workforce at the height of disaster recovery in March 2006 was Latino, and that half of those workers were undocumented. You might think that a state that has benefited so substantially from the labor of undocumented immigrants might be more open to the concept of amnesty. Instead we&rsquo;ve opted for amnesia. <a href="https://t.e2ma.net/webview/r0kvf/cb0ae369bd4ef953320564092dfb7f60">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></span></p>

<h2>
Mississippi and Texas Leading Gulf South States</h2>
<p>By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.</p>
<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;&ldquo;Today, a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration&nbsp;<span>traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities&rdquo; said&nbsp;</span><span>U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in a major policy initiative&nbsp;</span><span>presented last August. He explained that &ldquo;many aspects of our&nbsp;</span><span>criminal justice system may actually exacerbate these problems rather&nbsp;</span><span>than alleviate them.&rdquo;[1]&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span>Calling for a new approach to the &ldquo;war on drugs,&rdquo; the attorney&nbsp;</span><span>general lamented &ldquo;our system is broken&rdquo; as &ldquo;too many Americans go&nbsp;</span><span>to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law&nbsp;</span><span>enforcement reason.&rdquo;[2]&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span>Seventeen states, supported by the Justice Department and&nbsp;</span><span>leaders of both parties, have directed funding away from prison&nbsp;</span><span>construction toward evidence-based programs and services such as&nbsp;</span><span>drug treatment and supervision, designed to reduce recidivism.</span></p>
<p><span>&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span>The effort to pursue alternatives to incarceration for low-level,&nbsp;</span><span>nonviolent crimes is one of five key principles of the U.S. Justice&nbsp;</span><span>Department&rsquo;s &ldquo;Smart on Crime: Reforming the Criminal Justice&nbsp;</span><span>System for the 21st Century&rdquo; policy initiative.[3]&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span>Holder praised Texas for investing in drug treatment for&nbsp;</span><span>nonviolent offenders and changes in parole policies that reduced its&nbsp;</span><span>prison population by more than 5,000 inmates in 2012. Similar efforts i</span><span>n Arkansas helped reduce its prison population by more than 1,400. <a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/JSQ Fall 2014 Criminal Justice.pdf">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></span></p>
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<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/JSQ Fall 2014.pdf"><img alt="" src="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/Cover.JPG" /></a></p>
<p>To receive future publications by the Jesuit Social Research Institute please <a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/subscribe-jsri-publications">click here.&nbsp;</a></p>

<p>On June 3, 2014, speaking at Catholic University of America, then Archbishop of Spokane&nbsp;Blase Cupich provided the following response to a talk by Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga.<span>&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>In his address Archbishop Cupich makes clear the diametrical opposition between libertarianism and Catholic Social Thought in the context of a very helpful exposition of the thinking of Pope Francis and its high consistency with the teaching of his two predecessors Saint Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI:</p>
<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/Archbishop Cupich on Pope Francis and CST at CUA-0614-fran.pdf"><font color="#333333" face="Georgia" size="3"><span>Full Text &gt;&gt;</span></font></a></p>

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<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/106335450"><img alt="" src="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/greg boyle.JPG" /></a></p>

<p class="AlignCenter">The 5th Conference on Immigration to the US South (formerly Conference on Immigration to the Southeast) is a multidisciplinary meeting focusing on immigration and its impact in the US South. Conference panels will also engage in comparative analysis of other regions and bring in transnational and global perspectives. Under the theme, &ldquo;Immigration Reform and Beyond,&rdquo; the conference will feature keynote presentations by Archbishop Thomas Wenski (Archbishop of Miami), Dr. Mae Ngai&nbsp; (Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University), and Monica Ramirez (El Centro de los Derechos del Migrante). In addition, several conference presentations aim to promote an understanding of short-term and long-term challenges of immigration reform. Other panels will focus on undocumented youth, immigrant detention, legal and policy issues, media and public opinion, immigrant health and education issues, and best practices in community-based and faith-based organizing.</p>
<p class="AlignCenter"><strong><a href="http://reg.conferences.dce.ufl.edu/SSP/1400041408" target="_blank">Register for the conference here</a></strong><br />
Registration deadline is October 13, 2014&nbsp;</p>
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<a href="http://www.latam.ufl.edu/Data/Sites/43/media/final-program-to-review-9-15-14.pdf" target="_blank"><span>Conference Program</span></a></h2>
<p><img alt="" src="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/poster.jpg" /></p>

<p>by Fred Kammer, SJ</p>
<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Affordable Care Act (ACA) had three major provisions to promote expanded health coverage to Americans: a mandate for employers with fifty or more full-time employees to provide health insurance; an individual mandate to purchase insurance (with federal subsidies to assist families with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty level); and expansion of Medicaid coverage to all individuals with incomes at or below 138% of the federal poverty level. &nbsp;(138% of the federal poverty line is now $16,105 per year for an individual or $27,310 for a family of three.) In addition, the ACA created on line markets (&ldquo;exchanges&rdquo;) to promote insurance competition, prevented exclusion of people from coverage for pre-existing conditions, eliminated annual or lifetime dollar limits on insurance benefits, and allowed young adults to remain on their parents&rsquo; plans until 26 years old.</p>
<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In June, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court broke with decades of Medicaid law and provided that the Medicaid expansion was optional for the states. &nbsp;Since then, 26 states and the District of Columbia have chosen to implement the Medicaid Expansion, with the federal government absorbing 100% of the cost for the first three years. &nbsp;The federal share declines to, and remains at, 90% by the year 2021. Participating states must assume the balance. <a href="https://t.e2ma.net/webview/r0wkf/6f57e7798f5f657d8b14ce8b8b28b0b7">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>