Protestant White Supremacy

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.

Posted on July 16, 2020

Stand Up For Your Lungs

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.

Posted on July 15, 2020

We Tortured Some Folks

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.”

Posted on July 13, 2020

Defund Private Schools

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.

Posted on July 9, 2020

The Racial Mortgage Gap

By Redfin

Nearly 16% of Black Americans who apply for mortgages are rejected nationwide, compared with just 7% of white Americans, according to a Redfin analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The gap is widest in Milwaukee, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis, where denial rates for Black homebuyers are more than 10 percentage points higher than they are for white homebuyers. In Milwaukee and San Francisco, specifically, Black loan seekers are more than three times as likely to be denied a mortgage.
“Getting denied a loan serves a huge blow to a person’s self esteem – especially for people of color, who often feel like the world is already falling on them,” said Brittani Walker, a Redfin agent in Chicago. “My mother has been a renter since she moved out of her parents’ house. I tried to get her pre-approved for a mortgage a couple of years ago, but she was rejected because she had some blemishes on her credit. She broke down in tears and hasn’t tried again since. When people of color are stuck in this cycle of renting; their children often meet the same fate, missing out on thousands of dollars worth of home equity. If your parents never owned a home, where do you learn the value of homeownership?”

Posted on July 8, 2020

“Don’t Believe Proven Liars” – The Absolute Minimum Standard Of Prudence In Merger Scrutiny

By Cory Doctorow/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” – President George W Bush
Anti-monopoly enforcement has seen a significant shift since the 1970s. Where the U.S. Department of Justice once routinely brought suits against anticompetitive mergers, today, that’s extremely rare, even between giant companies in highly concentrated industries. (The strongest remedy against a monopolist – breaking them up altogether – is a relic of the past).
Regulators used to go to court to block mergers to prevent companies from growing so large that they could abuse their market power. In place of blocking mergers, today’s competition regulators like to add terms and conditions to them, exacting promises from companies to behave themselves after the merger is complete.
This safeguard continues to enjoy popularity with competition regulators, despite the fact that companies routinely break their public promises to safeguard users’ privacy and rarely face consequences for doing so. (These two facts may be related!)
When they do get sanctioned, the punishment almost never exceeds the profits from the broken promise. “A fine is a price.” Today, we’d like to propose a modest, incremental improvement to this underpowered deterrent:

Posted on July 4, 2020

U.S. Supreme Court Decision Forces Taxpayers To Pay For Religious Schooling 😠

By The Center for Inquiry

The Center for Inquiry condemns Tuesday’s Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue for forcing American taxpayers to pay for religious indoctrination, gutting the protections in both the United States Constitution and in No Aid Provisions of three-quarters of state constitutions that forbid the use of taxpayer dollars for religious purposes.
“This Court has been opening a hole up in Thomas Jefferson’s Wall of Separation between church and state,” said Nick Little, Vice President and Legal Director of the Center for Inquiry, an organization that advances reason, science, and secularism. “Now they’ve built a two-lane highway through that hole, inviting churches to raid the public treasury and drive gleefully away with taxpayer money.”

Posted on July 1, 2020

The John Oliver Coronavirus Chronicles IX: Evictions

By Last Week Tonight

“It might be worth thinking twice about what you’re taking part in if you’re throwing people out of their homes via Zoom – a platform you’re only using because it’s not safe for people to leave their homes.”

Posted on June 29, 2020

Chicago Cops Still Secretly Detaining People

By Kaitlyn Filip/The Chicago Council of Lawyers & Chicago Appleseed

Public Defender Amy Campanelli announced Tuesday the filing of a lawsuit demanding the Chicago Police Department abide by state law to provide a phone – and phone number for her station house unit – to all arrested people within one hour of detainment.
The lawsuit follows mass arrests of mostly peaceful protestors in late May and early June following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minnesota police. During the protests, police made thousands of arrests, and attorneys say their attempts to reach their clients were repeatedly blocked. Isolation from counsel – a situation which enables false confessions – remains a longstanding issue in Cook County, despite being made more visible by the events of the past month.

Posted on June 28, 2020

America Is Exceptional In All the Wrong Ways

By Robert Reich

As our incompetent president flounders in the face of crises – leading the worst coronavirus response in the industrialized world, and seeking to crush nationwide protests for Black lives – the hard truth about this country comes into focus: America is not exceptional, but it is the exception.
No other industrialized nation was as woefully unprepared for the pandemic as was the United States. With 4.25% of the world population, America has the tragic distinction of accounting for about 30% of pandemic deaths so far.
Why are we so different from other nations facing the same coronavirus threat? Why has everything gone so tragically wrong in America?

Posted on June 25, 2020

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