By The Roderick And Solange MacArthur Justice Center

A federal class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Illinois’ parole revocation process has been resolved with a guarantee that attorneys will be provided to eligible parolees and an agreement the state will take additional steps to bring fairness to the process of determining whether a parolee must return to prison due to a parole violation.
U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve approved the settlement agreement reached with the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. Plaintiffs were represented by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center and the Uptown People’s Law Center.
“The terms of the settlement, if implemented correctly, will guarantee that many parolees throughout the Illinois will receive state-funded attorneys to represent them throughout the revocation process,” said Alexa Van Brunt, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center and Clinical Assistant Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

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Posted on January 25, 2017

By Leonard Steinhorn/BillMoyers.com

When Donald J. Trump assumes the presidency and lays out his agenda for our country, he will likely proclaim himself, as he did in the campaign, the voice of “the forgotten Americans.”
To Trump, these “forgotten Americans” are the white working-class Rust Belt voters who catapulted him to the presidency, people who see themselves as an aggrieved silent majority whose diminished social and economic status never gains the attention of a coastal elite preoccupied with political correctness and minority rights.
But the truth is this: These white working-class voters have never been forgotten, while those who truly are forgotten still don’t have a voice.
If Trump really wants to speak for forgotten Americans, he would travel to the Mississippi Delta and the rural Black Belt of the American South, where conditions are so wretched and dire that even a struggling Rust Belt factory town might seem like a bountiful paradise of opportunity and wealth.

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Posted on January 21, 2017

By Joshua Jansa/The Conversation

In late November, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he had reached a deal with Carrier to keep about 800 manufacturing jobs in Indiana from moving to Mexico. After the announcement, we learned that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation would give $7 million in tax credits and grants to Carrier’s parent company in exchange for keeping the jobs in the state.
Trump proudly praised the agreement as a “great deal for workers” and said that it was part of a larger approach to keep jobs at home, saying that “This is the way it’s going to be.”
Having the chief executive of the United States negotiate individualized deals with corporations is certainly a new approach to economic policy nationally, though it is not without precedent. In fact, state governments have been negotiating targeted incentives with corporations for decades.
My research focuses on why states use incentives to attract and retain investment from corporations and whether they are effective. My work, as well as that of many others, shows that these deals do not create the jobs and economic growth they are purported to.

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Posted on January 19, 2017

By Alwyn Scott/Reuters

SEATTLE – A dispute over $8.7 billion in Washington state tax breaks is heating up after Chicago-based Boeing joined a new lobbying group set up to preserve the industry incentives, the biggest in U.S. history.
The group opposes efforts to make the aerospace tax breaks, passed in 2013, dependent on Boeing maintaining minimum employment levels in the state.
Such “claw-back” bills had failed the past two years, but union leaders and a lawmaker said in interviews on Tuesday they planned to try again in the legislative session that started this week.

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Posted on January 18, 2017

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

The private jets of the world’s wealthiest men and women are swarming the Swiss Alps for the annual World Economic Forum, which began Monday in Davos, Switzerland, in the midst of an ongoing global inequality crisis.
And that crisis is accelerating, according to a new Oxfam report: today, only eight men own the same amount of wealth as the 3.6 billion people who comprise the poorest half of humanity.
Those eight men are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.

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Posted on January 17, 2017

By Les Leopold/Common Dreams

History warns us to be very, very careful when using the phrase “white working class.” The reason has nothing to do with political correctness. Rather, it concerns the changing historical definitions of who is “white.”
For example, Eduardo Porter (like so many others) recently used this construction in the New York Times to ask , “Did the white working class vote its economic interests?” He claims that current data shows white people losing out to blacks and Hispanics in getting their fair share of the new jobs created since 2007:

Despite accounting for less than 15 percent of the labor force, Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost. But whites, who account for 78 percent of the labor force, lost more than 700,000 net jobs over the nine years.

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Posted on January 16, 2017

By Reade Levinson/Reuters

In late 2013, a San Antonio police officer stood accused of handcuffing a woman in the rear of his police car and then raping her. The same officer had remained on the force despite prior sexual misconduct complaints and other brushes with the law.
So early in 2014, backed by the city council, City Manager Sheryl Sculley proposed reforms to the police union contract in the Texas city. She wanted to eliminate a clause that erased prior misconduct complaints from cops’ records, increase citizen participation in the complaint process, and end officers’ ability to forfeit vacation time rather than serve suspensions.
The San Antonio Police Officers Association’s response: It targeted Sculley with a $1 million advertising campaign, according to estimates by the manager’s office. The union ran full-page newspaper ads and placed billboards downtown claiming crime rates rose because she refused to fill open police positions. Police backers broadcast ads highlighting Sculley’s six-figure salary and created a Facebook page, Remove City Manager Sheryl Sculley.

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Posted on January 14, 2017

By Lauren McCauley/Common Dreams

Amid the uproar over the Republican Party’s attempt to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics, a little-noticed rule change was passed that guts an essential element of government oversight.
A rules package approved by the House included a sentence that read: “Records created, generated, or received by the congressional office of a Member . . . are exclusively the personal property of the individual Member . . . and such Member . . . has control over such records.”
The change, first pointed out by OpenSecrets.org and reported by the Fiscal Times on Monday, effectively means that some documents are no longer the property of the U.S. government, giving lawmakers the ability to hide critical information from an oversight investigation.

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Posted on January 11, 2017

By Patrick G. Lee/ProPublica

A divisive vote, with jobs and immigrants the most combustible issues. An outcome that surprised the experts. A nation left on edge, with many anxious about intolerance and the violence that can stem from it.
No, not just America today, but also the United Kingdom seven months ago. Last June, voters there opted out of the European Union, ushering in a new prime minister who has since backed controversial proposals, including one that would require pregnant women to show papers that prove their “right” to use the national health system, before being allowed to give birth in a hospital.
So, were the worst fears of racial, ethnic or other hate violence realized? A mix of government agencies, academics and other organizations have been laboring to offer answers.

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Posted on January 10, 2017

By Ebony Slaughter-Johnson/Common Dreams

A little over 80 years ago, NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois wrote “Black Reconstruction in America,” a groundbreaking essay that looked at the racial politics of the post-Civil War years.
The major failure of those years, Du Bois insisted, was that poor whites and poor blacks failed to form an alliance around their mutual economic interests and challenges. Instead, white elites doubled down on their efforts to divide poor people of different races.
“So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro,” Dubois lamented, “a labor movement in the South [was] impossible.” Though similarly exploited by white elites, economically disenfranchised whites and blacks “never came to see their common interest.”

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Posted on January 9, 2017