By Shirley Smith/Other Words

Not long ago, I was a saleswoman and manager at Art Van Furniture, a furniture retailer that was an institution in metro Detroit for over half a century.
It was more than a job. My co-workers were my family, and we were all proud to work for our company. Thanks to our hard work, Art Van had grown from a family-owned business with one location to the top performing furniture retailer in our state.
But all that changed in 2017, when the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners bought the company out. Soon, the company I knew and loved began to vanish right in front of my eyes. Where we saw a strong company we were proud to work for, they saw something they could strip for parts.
By 2020, my job had become one of the over half a million retail jobs that have been destroyed by private equity big shots.

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Posted on September 21, 2021

By The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General

The Public Safety section of the Office of Inspector General (OIG) has completed a follow-up to its June 2020 review of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) management and production of records. Based on responses from CPD, OIG concludes that the Department has undertaken almost no corrective actions in response to OIG’s recommendations. As a result, CPD’s ability to meaningfully ensure that it is fulfilling all of its legal and constitutional obligations remains seriously impaired.

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Posted on September 16, 2021

By Rachel Mikva/The Conversation

The most restrictive abortion law in the country went into effect on Sept. 1 after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to deny an emergency appeal. In Texas, abortions are now illegal as early as six weeks into a pregnancy – before many women and girls know they are pregnant.
To date, 13 other states have passed laws establishing this six-week limit, but they face court challenges for state interference in women’s constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy.
Texas got around that problem by forbidding state officials from enforcing it. Instead, the state authorized private citizens to sue anyone who helps these women – family members, rape crisis counselors, medical professionals – and promises at least $10,000 plus attorneys’ fees if they win. Opponents have dubbed it the “sue thy neighbor” law.

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Posted on September 7, 2021

By Bob Lord/Inequality.org

The Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank founded in 1937 by business executives to “monitor the tax and spending policies of government agencies,” is once again ringing the alarm bell about tax proposals that impact only the wealthiest among us.
President Biden’s tax proposals, the Tax Foundation charges, add up to a 61.1 percent tax on “high-earning” taxpayers.
In reality, no actual taxpayers are going to face anything close to a 61 percent tax if the Biden proposals become law. The Tax Foundation, to reach that 61 percent figure, has had to add together two separate taxes on two different and totally mythical taxpayers.

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Posted on September 2, 2021

By The Center for Inquiry

Unscrupulous snake oil peddlers are taking advantage of the misinformation surrounding COVID-19 vaccines by selling homeopathic products that falsely promise to reverse the effects of vaccinations and claim to treat underlying diseases. The Center for Inquiry is calling upon federal authorities to protect American consumers from these dangerous frauds that are readily advertising through sites like Google and Amazon.
The Center for Inquiry (CFI), an organization that promotes reason and science over superstition and pseudoscience, has alerted the Federal Trade Commission about the predatory practices of companies that target vulnerable consumers. In a letter to the FTC, CFI urged the agency to use its power under the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act to take action against the advertisers and sellers of so-called “homeopathic vaccine detoxification” products.

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Posted on August 26, 2021

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

The latest court-ordered report on mental health care in Illinois state prisons was released to the public Friday. This report was created by Dr. Pablo Stewart, an independent, court-appointed monitor, as a result of the class action lawsuit Rasho v. Jeffreys, brought by Dentons, Equip for Equality, and Uptown People’s Law Center. This lawsuit alleged that the mental health care provided to prisoners in the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) is unconstitutional, and was settled in May of 2016.
Stewart’s report found that in the two years since the court ordered IDOC to make changes in its provision of mental health care, IDOC has failed in complying with any one of five court mandates:

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Posted on August 22, 2021

By Gordon Adams/The Conversation

In Afghanistan, American hubris – the United States’ capacity for self-delusion and official lying – has struck once again, as it has repeatedly for the last 60 years.
This weakness-masquerading-as-strength has repeatedly led the country into failed foreign interventions.

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Posted on August 19, 2021

By Abby Zimet/Common Dreams

Kabul, it’s been noted, was not lost yesterday. It was the inevitable final fall of a calamitous, arrogant, 20-year, trillion-dollar, too-many-deaths imperial misadventure doomed, like too many before it, to failure from its inept start.
In President Joe Biden’s speech, generally deemed resolute but callous about the mayhem unfolding, he asked a tough, good question – “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war?” – but framed it in a cynical, disingenuous way by adding, “when Afghan troops will not?”
The fourth president to oversee yet another senseless war in “the graveyard of empires,” he thus found an easy target for what is the “breathtaking failure” of longtime U.S. foreign policy while blithely ignoring the blood-soaked, hubris-laden history behind it – a “post-imperial Western fantasy” of disastrous military or CIA interventions through Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and then Iran, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, which was never at war with the U.S. and where Donald Rumsfeld, may he have no rest, demanded President George W. Bush “punish and get out.”

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Posted on August 18, 2021

By Elizabeth Weil and Mauricio Rodríguez Pons/ProPublica

The first thing to know about Thermal, California is this: It’s really damn hot. Already, at this early date in our planetary crisis, 139 days a year are over 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Thermal. Over the next 30 years, temperatures will rise 4 to 5 degrees more, and by the end of the century, more than half the year will be hotter than 95 and nearly a quarter will be hotter than 112.
The second thing to know about Thermal, California, is this: It’s a cartoonishly horrible expression of a moral and practical issue that exists, at some level, in every society on Earth. The climate crisis is an inequality magnifier. The heat and the hurricanes, the flooding and the wildfire smoke, slam down with full force on the disadvantaged. Meanwhile, the more privileged remain comparatively safe, protected by money and power.
That difference in suffering is known as the climate gap, defined by researchers in a foundational paper on the subject as “the disproportionate and unequal impact the climate crisis has on people of color and the poor.”
All over California – all over the United States – such gaps are increasingly evident. People of color, the poor and the undocumented live in hotter places. Latino workers labor outside more and are more likely to lack potable water. There are often substantial temperature differences between more and less affluent parts of the same cities. A study of 20 urban areas in the American Southwest revealed a 4-degree Fahrenheit gap between the poorest 10% of neighborhoods and the wealthiest 10% of neighborhoods in the same towns. The same pattern held when comparing white neighborhoods and Latino neighborhoods.

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Posted on August 17, 2021

By Global Financial Integrity

What do the Iranian government, a fugitive international jeweler, and a disgraced Harvard University fencing coach have in common? They have all used U.S. real estate to launder their ill-gotten gains.
In Acres of Money Laundering: Why U.S. Real Estate is a Kleptocrat’s Dream, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) dives into the murky world of global money laundering and demonstrates the ease with which kleptocrats, criminals, sanctions evaders, and corrupt government officials choose the U.S. real estate market as their preferred destination to hide and launder proceeds from illicit activities.

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Posted on August 11, 2021