By Daniel Golden/ProPublica

Perpetually in jeopardy, the use of racial preferences in college admissions is under greater threat than ever.
President Donald Trump has scrapped Obama-era guidelines that encouraged universities to consider race as a factor. He has proposed replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in a 2016 case upholding affirmative action by one vote, with the more conservative Brett Kavanaugh. Meanwhile, a lawsuit challenging Harvard’s preferences for Hispanics and African Americans has uncovered the university’s dubious pattern of rejecting academically outstanding Asian-American candidates – who don’t qualify for a race-related boost – by giving them low marks for personality. Either the Harvard case, or a similar lawsuit against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, could put an end to affirmative action.
If it is abolished, though, there will undoubtedly be increased pressure to also eliminate admissions criteria that favor a very different demographic – children of alumni and donors. Colleges are reluctant to drop these preferences of privilege for fear of hurting fundraising. But the political price of clinging to them could be significant.

Read More

Posted on July 16, 2018

A Statement By Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.

Trust in the police is at an all-time low. Anguish and anger in the community sky high. This is no time for business as usual. Recordings from officer body cams and any other video of the fatal police shooting Saturday evening of Harith (Snoop) Augustus must be released immediately.
Chicago can’t afford even the hint of another case of “16 shots and a cover-up.”

Read More

Posted on July 15, 2018

By Julián Aguilar/The Texas Tribune
EL PASO – A Brazilian woman who was detained and separated from her disabled grandson after they sought asylum at a port of entry last year was released from federal custody Thursday, her attorney confirmed.
Maria Vandelice de Bastos and her grandson Matheus da Silva Bastos first sought refuge in August after she said an off-duty police officer threatened her and her grandson after she went to the press to decry the horrible conditions in Matheus’s school, according to her asylum claim.
Even though she was found to have a credible fear of returning to her home country, she had been detained in El Paso ever since, while her grandson, who has severe epilepsy and autism, was transferred to a facility in Chicago and later a state-run center in Connecticut because he needs constant care.

Read More

Posted on July 15, 2018

By The Illinois Green Party

David St. Pierre, the executive director of Chicago’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, resigned effective June 27th, taking with him $95,000 plus benefits in a severance package first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.
The MWRD, a taxpayer-funded agency responsible for flood prevention and wastewater management, did not provide a reason for St. Pierre’s departure in its press release. St. Pierre had been the subject of an investigation led by an outside law firm, but MWRD Commissioner Debra Shore told the Sun-Times that “a non-disparagement clause in the separation agreement with St. Pierre” prevented her from discussing the probe.

Read More

Posted on July 13, 2018

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Students need to be able to express themselves; the freedom to do so is not only a question of their intellectual development but also one of human rights. Schoolkids may well rebel at the rules. They may challenge authority or, God forbid, even resist.
But punishing students for their political beliefs or their opinion of their school is to chastise developmentally appropriate behavior. Believe it or not, students have views on how good (or not) a school is beyond a standardized test score – and it’s in our best interest to hear them. They know their schools; plus, education is meant to help students grow, to help them be free-thinking citizens. Alas, many school leaders seem too afraid of what their students are thinking to let them voice those thoughts out loud, and they suppress their students’ rights in the process.
Last month, Joseph Munno, founder of University Preparatory Charter School for Young Men (UPrep) in Rochester, New York denied the first black valedictorian of the school, Jaisaan Lovett, the opportunity to give the ceremonial commencement speech, traditionally the preserve of valedictorians. Munno has not explained his decision, but there are several clues in Lovett’s six-year tenure at the charter school, where he had had several run-ins with the school’s principal. Lovett led a five-day student strike in his senior year, according to a USA Today report, because the school allegedly wouldn’t order needed safety equipment for a lab.

Read More

Posted on July 13, 2018

By Leah Litman/Take Care

In a post last week, I highlighted the utter meaninglessness of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) claim that she would look for a Supreme Court nominee who respects precedent. The claim was bunk, I wrote, because Collins had professed that Justice Neil Gorsuch, whom she voted to confirm to the Supreme Court, was, in her view, a pillar of a judge who respects precedent. As I explained, in his first full term on the Court, Gorsuch voted to overrule or suggested he was open to overruling a prior precedent in 11 of the 60 cases heard.
Also last week, Rich Chen, a professor at Maine Law, wrote an Op-Ed for the Portland, Maine Press Herald offering some other reasons why Collins’ promise to look for a nominee who respects precedent was utterly meaningless. As Rich observed, all judges respect precedent and believe in stare decisis (the doctrine that says even wrong decisions shouldn’t necessarily be overruled). All judges also believe that respect for precedent and stare decisis are not inviolable and have exceptions; thus, all judges believe that some precedents can and should be overruled. The real question is which ones, and under what circumstances. (Here’s a spoiler for you, Susan: Roe v. Wade,* and preferably soon.)

Read More

Posted on July 10, 2018

A Statement By Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.

It was Steve Bannon – at the time, President Trump’s top political advisor – who said, ‘If the subject is race, we win.’
So, the U.S. Justice and Education Departments have launched an attack on affirmative action just in time to make sure Donald Trump can exploit race to drive conservative white turnout in the mid-term elections.

Read More

Posted on July 5, 2018

By Sam Edwards/The Conversation

This year’s July 4 celebrations will come freighted with rather more complexity than usual, and on both sides of the Atlantic too. 2018’s commemoration of independence from British rule will take place just nine days before Donald Trump crosses the Atlantic for talks with his British counterpart, Theresa May. The two will follow the annual celebration of severance with a performance of togetherness, as Independence Day makes way for the “special relationship.”
Given Trump’s remarkably poor grasp of history – this is a man who recently asked if the Canadians had burned down the White House in 1814 – he’ll quite probably be oblivious to any such tensions between the upcoming events of July 4 and those of July 13, the date of his visit to London. But if his advisers take a glance at the history books to think through this coincidence of timing, they might be pleasantly surprised. While many Americans unambiguously celebrate July 4th as a national event marking independence from the “mother country,” in Britain the day has long been a chance to celebrate Anglo-American ties. How can it be both?

Read More

Posted on July 4, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

After a lengthy government career defined by his central role in bailing out predatory Wall Street banks as former President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner appears to have found his true calling in the private sector, where he now heads a large financial institution that exploits the economic struggles of poor Americans for profit.
As president of Warburg Pincus – a major New York private equity firm – Geithner helps manage a lucrative predatory lending outfit called Mariner Finance, which mass-mails loan checks to low-income Americans, hides exorbitant interest rates in the fine print, and quickly sues those who fail to repay the loan and interest in time, according to a detailed Washington Post report published late Sunday.

Read More

Posted on July 3, 2018

By A. Naomi Paik/The Conversation

President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies, where people crossing the border without documents are criminally prosecuted, do not represent the first time the U.S. has indefinitely detained immigrant children and families.
In the early 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton authorized the indefinite detention of Haitian refugees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, which the U.S. maintains in southeastern Cuba. As I detail in my book Rightlessness, Haitians were fleeing widespread violence resulting from the 1991 coup d’etat against President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Coup leader Raoul Cedras and military and paramilitary forces carried out a reign of terror against civilians, using tactics like disappearances, torture, rape and massacres.
When the U.S. detained Haitian refugees indefinitely, it set a precedent.

Read More

Posted on June 28, 2018