By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Antwan Wilson, the chancellor for D.C. Public Schools, agreed to leave his post last month after news broke that he had flouted his own school enrollment policy. Wilson sought to bypass the extremely competitive school lottery system in order to transfer his daughter to a higher-scoring school. The reaction from the city council and the public was harsh, swift and widespread. Having lost the support of his boss, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, Wilson stepped down, eventually agreeing to a six-month severance package.
Despite his position, Wilson did what an uncounted number of parents do daily: He sought to transfer his child to a higher-performing school. Public school superintendents are expected to enroll their children in their own school district to gain public trust. Wilson and his wife felt that the performing arts school his eldest child attended wasn’t a good fit. The neighborhood school the Wilsons are zoned for only had 1 percent of its students meet math expectations on last year’s standardized exam and 6 percent in reading. So Wilson’s wife coordinated with the deputy mayor of education, Jennifer Niles, to transfer their daughter to Woodrow Wilson High School, popular in the district, which has 22 percent of its students meet expectations in math and 54 percent in reading. Wilson High has a waiting list of 639 families.

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Posted on March 6, 2018

By Jon Stewart/Losing Libertarian Candidate for Governor

Links added by Beachwood.
BLOOMINGTON, IL – In what normally is an ordinary, boring, third-party nominating convention turned into a battle royale free-for-all as the Libertarian Party voting members convened to Bloomington’s Parke Regency Hotel this past weekend.
Running for the gubernatorial nomination were two first-timers and former pro wrestler and former GOP congressional candidate Jon Stewart, who was making his fourth attempt at public office.
After the first round of voting, Matthew C. Scaro was eliminated, and the frontrunner, Navy veteran Kash Jackson, failed to received over 51% of the vote, which moved the voting into a second round between Jackson and Stewart.
As tensions grew, the jumbotron slowly revealed the second round results . . . and it was a tie!
“At that point, the entire room erupted into chaos, cheers and confusion,” said Stewart campaign manager Donny Henry. “There has never been a tie in our party’s history, and with the contentious race between the candidates, this just added fuel to an already roaring inferno of ill feelings.”

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Posted on March 5, 2018

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

The non-partisan RAND Corporation’s sweeping new analysis on gun policy in the U.S. reveals that gun violence would be reduced with stricter laws restricting access to firearms – but also stresses that efforts to complete research on the issue have often been stymied by a lack of resources, due to a funding freeze that was pushed by the National Rifle Association decades ago.
Despite the lack of research to draw from, RAND’s findings did point to the conclusion that laws to prevent children from accessing firearms can decrease suicides and unintentional injuries or deaths and that universal background checks would lead to a drop in suicides and violent crimes. Concealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws – both backed by the NRA – were also found to increase violent crimes.
However, the group’s two-year effort to understand the precise impact gun control policies – and lack thereof – have had on the safety of American communities, was frequently frustrating, as researchers “consistently found inadequate evidence for the likely effects of different gun policies on a wide range of outcomes,” according to the study, Gun Policy in America.

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Posted on March 2, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

According to the newly leaked transcript of a New York Times staff meeting last year, editorial page editor James Bennet wants his employees and the public to believe that the paper of record is dedicated to open debate, not committed to any particular ideology, and opposed to “simply assert[ing] that we know what the right answers are.”
Oh, except when it comes to one small matter: lower corporate taxes.
After taking a few moments to insist that the Times “is very concerned with fairness” and outlining what the Huffington Post’s Ashley Feinberg described as “an ideology of no ideology,” Bennet went on to express support for a lower corporate tax rate – one of the central components of the tax bill President Donald Trump signed into law last year.
“In thinking about, for example, the tax bill in this and that, you know, we actually like the idea of reducing corporate rates,” Bennet said. “We’re not for taxation for purposes of taxation, but we are very concerned about fairness and equitable distribution. And it’s sort of wrestling with the, with the tensions there is, I think, how we come out where we do.”
Bennet’s remarks are just the latest example of why he is facing intense criticism – both internally and externally – for such head-scratchers as bringing on right-wing climate denier Bret Stephens as a full-time columnist and coming within a hair’s breadth of hiring a tech writer who is pals with neo-Nazis.

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Posted on February 28, 2018

By Steve Balkin

I am shocked by the recent shootings in our schools and moved by the pleas for help from students at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. They motivated me to try to think of solutions, implementable in the short-term, that can soon reduce the harm from these terrible gun violence tragedies.
In a blog post here in September 2016, I wrote a comprehensive 10-point strategy for reducing violent crime in Chicago.
Now I am focusing more narrowly on containing violence from military-style guns and accoutrements of assault. The starting point is that guns have negative externalities, a term economists use for harmful side effects imposed on third parties (neither the buyer nor the seller).
Guns owned by law-abiding persons can be lost or stolen and get into the wrong hands; a mentally healthy person owning guns can become stressed, depressed, paranoid or delusional; guns usually handled surely and safely, may become objects of accidents that can harm others. The harms are magnified greatly when the guns are automatic or semi-automatic weapons of assault – weapons that can rapidly fire with magazines that have capacities larger than five cartridges.

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Posted on February 26, 2018

By The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Another week, another story of a project that was supposed to help Africa, but a tax scheme that did the opposite. We’ve published a story on a satellite, launched in 2011, which was touted as a communications and development boon for the continent.
But, that’s in stark contrast to its tax strategy. A PowerPoint presentation from the Paradise Papers reveals the company would earn $936 million over 17 years, but never pay taxes above $300,000. That’s thanks to some clever tax maneuvers and offshore companies in Mauritius – one of the continent’s premier tax havens.

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Posted on February 22, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

With American workers already struggling against stagnant wages, declining union strength, and vicious attacks by the Trump administration, a new investigation by Politico published Sunday found that low-wage employees in the United States are also contending with wage theft on a massive scale – a crisis that many states lack the resources or political will to address.
According to Politico’s Marianne Levine, who examined state minimum-wage enforcement protocols over a period of nine months, “workers are so lightly protected that six states have no investigators to handle minimum-wage violations, while 26 additional states have fewer than 10 investigators. Given the widespread nature of wage theft and the dearth of resources to combat it, most cases go unreported. Thus, an estimated $15 billion in desperately needed income for workers with lowest wages goes instead into the pockets of shady bosses.”

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Posted on February 20, 2018

Asiaciti’s Offshore Marketing Tour Of The U.S.

“Now comes the story of the Asiaciti promotional tour of America. A newly released trove of documents gives us an incredible insight into the city-by-city itinerary of offshore specialists marketing their wares to American clients. It has all the classics of an American road trip, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and Miami!” the International Consortium of Investigative Reporters reports.
Last stop: Chicago. Featuring Adrian Taylor, managing director at the Cook Islands branch of Asiaciti, a firm specializing in offshore companies and trusts. Let’s take a look.

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Posted on February 15, 2018

By The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization

The Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and Little Village community at large were shocked to learn Tuesday that Hilco and Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed the demolition of the Crawford Coal Power Plant and the building of a potential logistics facility at 3400 South Pulaski Road.
We are disappointed that Emanuel and Ald. Ricardo Munoz have already publicly proposed a plan and are pushing it forward without the involvement of our community as stipulated in the original Guiding Principles for site redevelopment agreed to with former coal plant owner Midwest Generation.
This top-down decision to plan for a diesel-intensive logistics center or distribution facility threatens to undermine the life-saving improvement in air quality won by the shut-down of the Crawford coal plant.

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Posted on February 14, 2018

By Amy Wilson-Chapman/The International Consortium Of Investigative Journalists

Under the regime of President Nicolas Maduro, journalists in Venezuela have been constantly silenced. But that hasn’t stopped our partner Armando.info from reporting on the questionable dealings of a government food program since April last year.
Now, though, four journalists from Armando.info have been forced to leave their home country as they prepare to publish more stories from their investigation. I’d encourage you all to read the harrowing story of Joseph Poliszuk and his team, who are working to publish more stories – despite the oppression they face.

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Posted on February 13, 2018