<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: top; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.450000762939453px; clear: left; text-align: justify;">by Sean Salai, S.J.&nbsp;</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: top; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.450000762939453px; clear: left; text-align: justify;">White House report has indicated that 24 state legislatures chose not to opt into the Obamacare Medicaid expansion this year, implying an ongoing GOP resistance that Southern Catholic leaders fear will hurt the working poor.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: top; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.450000762939453px; text-align: justify;">According to the report, released on July 2, only 26 state legislatures have so far opted into the Affordable Care Act&rsquo;s offer of financial assistance for states that expand Medicaid coverage to include non-elderly family members whose incomes are below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. &nbsp;<a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/catholic-leaders-lament-obstacles-medicaid-expansion">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

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<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By Sue Weishar, Ph.D.&nbsp;</span></h2>
<p>A humanitarian crisis of epic proportion is unfolding along the U.S.-Mexico border. Since October of last year 52,000 children have been apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol after crossing into the U.S. without family members.[1] Officials estimate that 90,000 unaccompanied migrant children may be apprehended by the end of the year, as many as 140,000 children next year.[2] On June 2 President Obama appointed the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to lead the government&#39;s response to the crisis. His administration is requesting $1.4 billion in additional funding from Congress to help feed, house, and transport the children and has turned to the Defense Department to provide temporary housing.[3]&nbsp;<a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/Kids%20in%20Crisis_0.pdf">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>by Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.</p>
<p>At a time when there seems to be deepening conflict over the meaning of freedom, I invite readers to take the opportunity this Independence Day to reflect upon the sacrifices made by the Freedom Riders in 1964. The Freedom Riders teach us about the deep yearning of African Americans for the full human flourishing of everyone.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Take the example of Diane Nash, one of the student leaders trained in nonviolence under the tutelage of the Reverend John Lawson at Fisk University in 1959-1960. Alongside John L. Lewis, among others, Nash helped lead the nonviolent sit-ins in Nashville in early 1960. <a href="https://t.e2ma.net/webview/78p5e/727bcc6267bf0faa39684207d4cfc370">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p style="margin-top: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Verdana; vertical-align: baseline; list-style-type: none;">By Fred Kammer, S.J.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Verdana; vertical-align: baseline; list-style-type: none;">In recent years, scholars and policy-makers have developed alternative measures of &quot;poverty&quot; that look at a range of issues in measuring human well-being beyond the simpler economic &quot;poverty line.&quot; While there are a variety of such measures, the one that gained acceptance internationally is the&nbsp;<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Human Development Report</em>&nbsp;and its Human Development Index adopted by the United Nations Development Program in 1990.[1] The focus is more on the &quot;human development&#39; than &#39;poverty,&#39; drawing on the work of economist Mahbub ul Haq at the World Bank in the 1970s.&nbsp;</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: Verdana; vertical-align: baseline; list-style-type: none;">...Dr. Haq argued that&nbsp;<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">existing measures of human progress failed to account for the true purpose of development-to improve people&#39;s lives.</em>&nbsp;In particular, he believed that the commonly used measure of Gross Domestic Product failed to adequately measure well-being.[2]&nbsp;<a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/The%20Kids%20Count%20Gulf%20South_0.pdf" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 32px 0px 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background: url(http://www.loyno.edu/assets/shared/images/css/icons/pdf.gif) 100% 50% no-repeat transparent;">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>Featured articles include:</p>
<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/The Kids Count Gulf South.pdf">&quot;The Kids Count Gulf South: Children in the region continue not to count much!&quot;</a> --Kammer&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/Catholic Social Thought and Wages.pdf">&quot;Catholic Social Thought and Wages&quot;</a> --Kammer</p>
<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/Kids in Crisis.pdf">&quot;Kids in Crisis: The surge of unaccompanied immigrant children to the border&quot;</a> --Weishar&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/The Monstrous Elegance of White Supremacy.pdf">&quot;The Monstrous Elegance of White Supremacy&quot;</a> --Mikulich</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>To receive future <em>JustSouth</em> publications please click <a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/subscribe-jsri-publications">here</a>.&nbsp;</p>

<p>by Sue Weishar, Ph.D.</p>
<p><span>In late August last year, two months after the U.S. Senate had passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill, I attended a Town Hall meeting called by Congressman Steve Scalise. The meeting was held in Lakeview-- one of the New Orleans neighborhoods hardest hit by flooding when the levees failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Immigrant workers, many undocumented, were essential in rebuilding Lakeview and much of the Gulf Coast after Katrina [1]. I came to the meeting assuming that a neighborhood that had benefited so much from immigrant laborers would be open to the possibility of immigration reform. I was proven wrong.&nbsp;</span><a href="http://t.e2ma.net/webview/bgyze/7d4a359f89a6c98e8c1bb9074a0f61d2">More&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p><img alt="" src="http://www.labudget.org/lbp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Medicaid-by-district-tables-01.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 700px; float: right;" /></p>
<p><img alt="" src="http://www.labudget.org/lbp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Medicaid-by-district-tables-02.jpg" style="height: 700px; width: 600px; float: right;" /></p>

<p>by Fred Kammer, S.J.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In the past two weeks the Louisiana Legislature rejected regulation of payday lending that would have protected working poor families from predatory loans, refused to extend federally-funded Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of workers unable to afford health care, and determined that our lowest paid workers did not deserve a raise. Legislators in other Gulf South states made similar decisions on so many fronts, decisions driven not by care for their own people but by special interests, business lobbyists, prejudice, and yes, virulent opposition to President Obama and the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>For overwhelmed advocates for the &quot;least among us,&quot; it has not been a good year. For the poor and working poor, it has been more of the same mean-spiritedness and lack of compassion that has left this region at the bottom of almost every indicator of educational achievement, health status, and economic well-being.&nbsp;<a href="http://t.e2ma.net/webview/3pcre/5332a6a21c3aac6726019cc86cc51cde">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>By Sue Weishar, Ph.D.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The family holds a central place in Catholic Social Teaching. Key Church teachings describe the family as &quot;the sanctuary of life,&quot;[1] the &quot;essential cell of human society,&quot;[2] and the &quot;domestic Church.&quot;[3] Given the primacy of the family in the spiritual, ethical, social, and emotional formation of children, the unprecedented increase in deportations since President Obama took office is deeply distrurbing. An Urban Institute study found that one child was left behind for every two immigrants apprehended by immigration authorities in worksite raids.[4] Approximately 1,100 immigrants are being deported a day- causing profound grief, anguish, and hardship for tens of thousands of children a year. If the current pace of deportations continues, the Obama administration will have deported more than 2 million immigrants by the of 2014, a deplorable record for an American president.[5]</p>
<p><a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/JSRI Spring Quarterly 2014 Immigration_1.pdf">MORE&gt;&gt;&nbsp;</a></p>

<p>Posted By: In Our Company, April 16, 2014</p>
<p>On Friday, April 11, Jesuits and lay colleagues at two social ministries apostolates in Honduras learned Carlos Mej&iacute;a Orellana was murdered inside his home. Mej&iacute;a Orellana worked as the marketing director at Radio Progreso for 14 years. He was among the 16 employees at Radio Progreso and the Team for Reflection, Investigation, and Communication (ERIC) who have received repeated death threats for their journalism, community organizing and human rights work.</p>
<p>The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had called upon the government of Honduras on three separate occasions to protect the lives and safety of staff at these Jesuits apostolates.</p>
<p>At a press conference on Saturday, Fr. Ismael &ldquo;Melo&rdquo; Moreno, SJ, director of these institutions, said that Mej&iacute;a Orellana&rsquo;s murder is another example of the failed security policy of the Honduran government and its lack of political will to take effective measures to protect its citizens.</p>
<p>In September 2013, the U.S. Jesuit Conference organized a delegation to meet with Jesuits and collaborators in Honduras to learn about their work to organize communities and protect their land from mining companies and other powerful interests, work that became even more important and dangerous following the military coup in 2009. With corruption rampant in the Honduran police force and among elected officials, community members insist that violent acts like the murder of Mej&iacute;a Orellana often take place with impunity. <a href="http://inourcompany.org/2014/04/16/jesuit-colleague-killed-in-honduras/">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>
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<p>Related Articles: <a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/Winter 2013- Honduran Agony-Weishar-Baudouin-jsq_3.pdf">Honduran Agony: The Spiral of Violence and Corruption By Sue Weishar, P.h.D and Mary Baudouin&nbsp;</a></p>