By The AAAN

Under Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, Chicago police officers can hold certain immigrants past their release date in response to detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Chicago maintains this practice of jailing immigrants beyond the time when they would ordinarily be released even though courts around the country have ruled such holds unconstitutional. Most recently, on Monday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that local law enforcement officials, such as police officers, do not have the authority to hold individuals based on immigration detainer requests.

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Posted on July 26, 2017

By John Light/BillMoyers.com

In 2016, CEOs at America’s largest firms made, on average, 271 times more than the average US worker. Fifty years ago, that ratio was 20-to-1.
The CEO-to-worker pay ratio, calculated annually by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, has narrowed slightly in recent years; in 2014, it was 299-to-1. But it has grown by an order of magnitude since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping data in the 1960s, and has even doubled many times over since the late 1980s, when it was 59-to-1.

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Posted on July 25, 2017

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

While the Senate GOP’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act has been denounced as potentially devastating to the poor, the sick, women, people of color, children and those with pre-existing conditions, a new analysis published Monday finds that no matter what happens, the CEOs of large healthcare companies are likely to continue living lavishly.
Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, the “CEOs of 70 of the largest U.S. healthcare companies cumulatively have earned $9.8 billion,” according to Axios’s Bob Herman.
Herman goes on to add that the CEOs’ earnings “far outstrip[ped] the wage growth of nearly all Americans.”
“The richest year [for healthcare CEOs] was 2015, when 70 healthcare CEOs collectively made $2 billion,” Herman notes. “That was an average of about $28.5 million per CEO and a median of about $17.3 million per CEO. The median household income in 2015 was $56,515, which the average healthcare CEO made in less than a day.”

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Posted on July 25, 2017

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

Though an explosive interview with President Donald Trump conducted by the New York Times published Wednesday evening resulted in breaking news bulletins across the media and provided an inside look at Trump’s state of mind regarding current events, including health care, some in the journalistic community are expressing disappointment at the lack of substantive questions asked of the president – adding to growing concern about how the press engages with the current White House.
Allowed to ramble on in vague terms about health care policies he appears to know little about, the three interviewers were faulted for not holding Trump to account regarding specific aspects of the various proposals or the ongoing failure of Republicans in the Senate.

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Posted on July 24, 2017

By Brian Levin/The Conversation

Hate crimes against Muslims have been on the rise. The murder of two samaritans for aiding two young women who were facing a barrage of anti-Muslim slurs on a Portland train is among the latest examples of brazen acts of anti-Islamic hatred.
Earlier in 2017, a mosque in Victoria, Texas was burned to the ground by an alleged anti-Muslim bigot.
And just last year, members of a small extremist group called “The Crusaders” plotted a bombing “bloodbath” at a residential housing complex for Somali-Muslim immigrants in Garden City, Kansas.
I have analyzed hate crime for two decades at California State University-San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. And I have found that the rhetoric politicians use after terrorist attacks is correlated closely to sharp increases and decreases in hate crimes.

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Posted on July 20, 2017

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

No, in turns out, the United States does not have the “best healthcare system in the world.”
In the midst of a deeply unpopular attempt by the Republican Party to pass legislation that could leave 22 million more Americans uninsured and as support for Medicare for All soars, a new analysis published on Friday by the Washington-based Commonwealth Fund finds that the U.S. healthcare system currently ranks last among 11 other advanced countries in healthcare outcomes, access, equity, and efficiency.
The U.S. “fell short” in almost every domain measured, the Commonwealth Fund’s senior vice president for policy and research Eric Schneider, M.D., told the New Scientist.

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Posted on July 17, 2017

By Simon Haeder/The Conversation

Despite many assertions to the contrary, U.S. Senate leaders are now saying they want to vote on the replacement bill for Obamacare before the month is out.
Front and center is the planned transformation of America’s Medicaid program, which covers 20 percent of Americans and provides the backbone of America’s health care system.
As a professor of public policy, I have written extensively about the American health care system and the Affordable Care Act.

Living in West Virginia, perhaps the nation’s poorest state, I have also seen the benefits of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion since 2014.
To understand how the ACHA’s proposed changes to Medicaid would affect people and our health care system, let’s look more closely at the program.

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Posted on July 17, 2017

By Rachel Glickhouse/ProPublica

“Go home. We need Americans here!” white supremacist Jeremy Joseph Christian yelled at two black women – one wearing a hijab – on a train in Portland, Oregon, in May. According to news reports, when several commuters tried to intervene, he went on a rampage, stabbing three people. Two of them died.
If the fatal stabbing was the worst racist attack in Portland this year, it was by no means the only one. In March, BuzzFeed reported on hate incidents in Oregon and the state’s long history as a haven for white supremacists. Some of the incidents they found were gathered by Documenting Hate, a collaborative journalism project we launched earlier this year.
Documenting Hate is an attempt to overcome the inadequate data collection on hate crimes and bias incidents in America. We’ve been compiling incident reports from civil rights groups, as well as news reports, social media and law enforcement records. We’ve also asked people to tell us their personal stories of witnessing or being the victim of hate.
It’s been about six months since the project launched. Since then, we’ve been joined by more than 100 newsrooms around the country. Together, we’re verifying the incidents that have been reported to us – and telling people’s stories.

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Posted on July 14, 2017

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

As Iraqi forces celebrate their victory over the Islamic State (ISIS) in Mosul, a damning new report by Amnesty International sheds light on the killing of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the U.S.-led coalition which “may constitute war crimes” – and demands that the coalition acknowledge the loss of civilian life and take steps to lessen non-military casualties.
Thousands of civilians have been killed in Mosul and millions have been displaced since ISIS took control of the city in June 2014. The crimes of the group have been well-documented by Amnesty International and other human rights groups. The report notes that ISIS deliberately put thousands of civilians in harm’s way, using them as human shields in the city’s conflict zones, and killing people who attempted to escape.
The report also focuses on the human cost of the U.S.-led coalition’s actions in Mosul. Amnesty interviewed 150 witnesses, experts and analysts about dozens of attacks, and focused on a pattern of attacks that took place between January and July 2017.

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Posted on July 12, 2017

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

While many technology companies continue to step up their privacy game by adopting best practices to protect sensitive customer information when the government demands user data, telecommunications companies are failing to prioritize user privacy when the government comes knocking, an EFF annual survey shows. Even tech giants such as Apple, Facebook, and Google can do more to fully stand behind their users.
EFF’s seventh annual “Who Has Your Back” report, released Monday, digs into the ways many technology companies are getting the message about user privacy in this era of unprecedented digital surveillance. The data stored on our mobile phones, laptops, and especially our online services can, when aggregated, paint a detailed picture of our lives – where we go, who we see, what we say, our political affiliations, our religion, and more.

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Posted on July 11, 2017