By Abe Scarr/Illinois PIRG

On Wednesday, the Illinois Commerce Commission heard from the Commonwealth Edison Company to address recently implemented ethics reforms. Illinois PIRG director Abe Scarr made the following comments during the public comment period.

Good morning. My name is Abe Scarr and I am the director of Illinois PIRG. Thank you for the opportunity to provide comment today. Also, thank you to the new Commission leadership for your commitment to operating with increased transparency.
We’re here today because of the recent revelations of ComEd’s corrupt and illegal schemes, but this corruption is not news. It has been plain to see to anyone willing to look: ComEd and Exelon have used political power to corrupt utility regulation in Illinois.

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Posted on July 30, 2020

By Andre Perry and Annelies Goger/The Hechinger Report

“Students want and need to come back to school,” Kimberly Martin, a principal of Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C. told me two weeks ago. Martin explained that although social distancing may reduce exposure to coronavirus it also distances children from services and supports that are critical to their well-being.
As an example, Martin told of a student in special education who returned to Wilson High for support when he was confused about how to obtain a necessary work permit for a new job.
“After he met with me and the social worker to address the work permit issue, I saw him just hanging around the school staff, and I realized how much he missed them.” Martin added, “Many students miss the network of adults that provide their needs, including teachers, custodians, social workers and all non-instructional staff.”

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Posted on July 29, 2020

By David Rutter

In fourteen hundred, ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. But he was lost. Oh so lost.
And when he slogged ashore in the Bahamas the morning of October 12 – a Thursday – he had become the first official male traveler who got lost because he wouldn’t stop to ask for directions.
“Is this Fort Lauderdale?” he reportedly asked the first person he met.
“No,” said Bruce, the first AAA Indigenous Peoples’ Travel Agent.
“Which direction is Fort Lauderdale? And where’s the gold?”
“Dunno,” said Bruce.

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Posted on July 27, 2020

By David Rutter

Note to Hamilton author Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yes, we all loved your brilliant invention, but every day I love it less.
Every day I wonder more what I liked about it. What’s wrong with me?

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Posted on July 24, 2020

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The European Union’s highest court last week made clear – once again – that the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs are incompatible with the privacy rights of EU citizens.
The judgement was made in the latest case involving Austrian privacy advocate and EFF Pioneer Award winner Max Schrems. It invalidated the “Privacy Shield,” the data protection deal that secured the transatlantic data flow, and narrowed the ability of companies to transfer data using individual agreements (Standard Contractual Clauses, or SCCs).

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Posted on July 20, 2020

By Patrick Rucker/The Capitol Forum

In the spring of 2018, bank regulators trained to spot discriminatory lending detected something alarming at Bank of America. The bank was offering fewer loans to minority homebuyers in Philadelphia than to white people in a way that troubled examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to two people directly involved in the probe and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.
The officials suspected the second-largest bank in the United States was “redlining,” or deliberately turning its back on minority homebuyers, the people said. But after complaints from Bank of America, the OCC’s investigation stalled by September 2018. The OCC, which is part of the U.S. Treasury Department, never sanctioned the bank.
The abandoned Bank of America inquiry is part of a larger, previously unreported pattern in which the Trump administration has pulled back on civil rights enforcement as a part of its overall relaxation of bank oversight. Since Donald Trump took office, the OCC has quietly shelved at least six investigations of discrimination and redlining, according to internal agency documents and eight people familiar with the cases.

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Posted on July 18, 2020

By Tiffany Puett/The Conversation

In the long-overdue discussions taking place over the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, few appear to be addressing the relationship between religion and racism.
This comes despite notions of white supremacy being entwined with the history of religion in the United States.

As a scholar specializing in issues of religion and identity, I argue for a deeper introspection around how white supremacy permeates all parts of American society, including its religious institutions.

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Posted on July 16, 2020

By The American Lung Association

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, a public health success which continues to save hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
Despite this progress, climate change poses new challenges to protecting the nation’s air quality, placing the health of all Americans at risk.
To drive collective action on climate change and air pollution, American Lung Association launched Wednesday the Stand Up For Clean Air initiative, encouraging everyone to pledge to take action at Lung.org/air; to take small, individual actions that can add up to a big, collective difference.

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Posted on July 15, 2020

By The ACLU

In a historic decision released last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights determined that four survivors of the U.S. secret detention and torture program have the right to present their case before the regional tribunal.
Binyam Mohamed, Abou Elkassim Britel, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah and Bisher al-Rawi are victims of the U.S. extraordinary rendition program – the post-9/11 coordinated global enterprise of kidnapping, bounty payments, incommunicado detention, and torture. Their landmark complaint was lodged with the Inter-American Commission in 2011 after a federal case they filed was thrown out on the basis that allowing the case to proceed would have revealed “state secrets.”

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Posted on July 13, 2020

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

A national uprising for racial justice and a pandemic killing disproportionately more Black people have made the call to action clear: We must dismantle the structures that generate racial disparities. Education activists have joined that call by demanding that districts defund police in schools. School boards are listening. The Los Angeles Board of Education last week voted to cut funding to its school police force by 35 percent, amounting to a $25 million reduction.
Calls to defund the police, whether in schools or in our cities, are just one part of what must become a larger movement to end taxpayer funding for institutions that are anti-Black at their core. But as millions of protestors across the country call for monies to be redirected from police to institutions that propel economic and social growth, democracy and unity, school choice advocates are holding fast to their sordid legacy of defunding already under-resourced traditional public schools that serve Black children.
Late last month, choice advocates won a legal battle that is out of step with the current march toward racial justice and democracy.

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Posted on July 9, 2020