By Charles Ornstein/ProPublica

As President Donald Trump faces criticism for blocking users on his Twitter account, people across the country say they, too, have been cut off by elected officials at all levels of government after voicing dissent on social media.
In Arizona, a disabled Army veteran grew so angry when her congressman blocked her and others from posting dissenting views on his Facebook page that she began delivering actual blocks to his office.
A central Texas congressman has barred so many constituents on Twitter that a local activist group has begun selling t-shirts complaining about it.
And in Kentucky, the Democratic Party is using a hashtag #BevinBlocked to track those who’ve been blocked on social media by Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. (Most of the officials blocking constituents appear to be Republican.)
The growing combat over social media is igniting a new-age legal debate over whether losing this form of access to public officials violates constituents’ First Amendment rights to free speech and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Those who’ve been blocked say it’s akin to being thrown out of a town hall meeting for holding up a protest sign.

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Posted on June 8, 2017

Patricia Marroquin Norby via CAN TV

“Patricia Marroquin Norby, director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, presents ‘Indigenous Metropolis: Chicago’s Urban Indians’ at the Chicago History Museum. This program was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV).”

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Posted on June 7, 2017

By Michael Grabell/ProPublica

One afternoon this fall, I knocked on the door of a red brick apartment building in Akron, Ohio, looking for a Bhutanese refugee who’d lost the tips of his fingers at a Case Farms chicken plant in a vacuum-pressure machine known as a “fat sucker.”
In the apartment’s tiny living room, a young man told his story in halting English. As he spoke, I realized that his name was different from the one I had, and, instead of losing his fingertips in a fat sucker at the company’s Canton plant, he’d lost his pinkie to a saw at its plant in nearby Winesburg. I had the wrong guy, but I’d stumbled on yet another Bhutanese refugee who’d sacrificed part of his body for the company.
The Bhutanese ended up at Case Farms in 2011 by way of a refugee resettlement agency. It was a marriage of the desperate. The refugees needed work that didn’t require speaking English or an American education. Case Farms needed workers who would accept the low pay and grueling, cold and monotonous conditions that U.S. safety inspectors have repeatedly deemed extremely dangerous.

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Posted on May 23, 2017

By Patrick G. Lee/ProPublica

One morning in February, lawyer Marty Rosenbluth set off from his Hillsborough, North Carolina, home to represent two anxious clients in court. He drove about eight hours southwest, spent the night in a hotel and then got up around 6 a.m. to make the final 40-minute push to his destination: a federal immigration court and detention center in the tiny rural Georgia town of Lumpkin.
During two brief hearings over two days, Rosenbluth said, he convinced an immigration judge to grant both of his new clients more time to assess their legal options to stay in the United States. Then he got in his car and drove the 513 miles back home.
“Without an attorney, it’s almost impossible to win your case in the immigration courts. You don’t even really know what to say or what the standards are,” said Rosenbluth, who works for a private law firm and took on the cases for a fee. “You may have a really, really good case. But you simply can’t package it in a way that the court can understand.”
His clients that day were lucky. Only 6 percent of the men held at the Lumpkin complex – a 2,001-bed detention center and immigration court – have legal representation, according to a 2015 study in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Nationwide, it’s not much better, the study of data from October 2006 to September 2012 found: Just 14 percent of detainees have lawyers. That percentage is likely to get even smaller under the Trump administration, which has identified 21,000 potential new detention beds to add to the approximately 40,000 currently in use.

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Posted on May 18, 2017

By The Illinois Public Interest Research Group

The Illinois Senate voted 31-23 to lessen the influence of big money in Illinois elections by passing Senate Bill 1424. The legislation, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Daniel Biss and championed by good government groups Fair Elections Illinois, Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, and Illinois Public Interest Research Group, would create a small donor matching system, wherein candidates would be eligible to receive public matching funds for small contributions by voluntarily agreeing to forgo big money and corporate contributions. A similar system has existed in New York City for decades and has been adopted by other jurisdictions in recent years.
“After Citizens United, there is little we can do to limit candidates funding their campaigns by relying on a small number of mega-donors” said Illinois PIRG director Abe Scarr. “However, we can level the playing field by raising the voices of ordinary Americans through small donor matching programs. Small donor matching programs allow candidates who have broad support from voters but don’t have access to, or choose not to curry favor with, big money to compete and win against big money candidates.”

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Posted on May 17, 2017

By Neal Gabler/BillMoyers.com

Warner Brothers and Universal have both been dusting off an inventory of classic monsters – King Kong, Godzilla, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, etc. – which prompted New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott to speculate whether this was a reaction to a contemporary America where monstrousness now seems to run rampant. When you add in a film like the mega hit Get Out, about human monsters, you get the feeling that maybe Hollywood is onto something.
Monster films have always dealt with anxieties – the Depression in the ’30s, the Soviet threat and nuclear threat in the ’50s, technological change in the ’60s and ’70s. But today, the danger is different. Today the danger is us.

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Posted on May 12, 2017

By William Isaac and Andi Dixon/The Conversation

In early 2017, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a new initiative in the city’s ongoing battle with violent crime. The most common solutions to this sort of problem involve hiring more police officers or working more closely with community members. But Emanuel declared that the Chicago Police Department would expand its use of software, enabling what is called “predictive policing,” particularly in neighborhoods on the city’s South Side.
The Chicago police will use data and computer analysis to identify neighborhoods that are more likely to experience violent crime, assigning additional police patrols in those areas. In addition, the software will identify individual people who are expected to become – but have yet to be – victims or perpetrators of violent crimes. Officers may even be assigned to visit those people to warn them against committing a violent crime.
Any attempt to curb the alarming rate of homicides in Chicago is laudable. But the city’s new effort seems to ignore evidence, including recent research from members of our policing study team at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, that predictive policing tools reinforce, rather than reimagine, existing police practices. Their expanded use could lead to further targeting of communities or people of color.

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Posted on May 11, 2017

By Jonathan J.B. Mijs/The Conversation

Inequality in America is on the rise. Income gains since the 1980s have been concentrated at the top. The top 10 percent today take home 30 percent of all income, and control more than three-quarters of all wealth. We have returned to the level of income inequality that marked the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.
Who gets what in America continues to be impacted by a person’s race, gender and family resources. What’s striking, however, is how little people seem to notice.

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Posted on May 10, 2017

By Scott Malone/Reuters

When the Masjid Al-Kareem mosque in Providence, Rhode Island, received a threatening letter in November calling Muslims a “vile and filthy people,” its members were frightened enough they asked for and got extra police protection.
The 42-year-old mosque was far from alone. The letter it received was one of 2,213 anti-Muslim bias incidents in the United States last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The report found a 57 percent increase in the number of incidents in 2016, up from 1,409 in 2015. Incidents increased 5 percent from 2014 to 2015.
While the group had been seeing a rise in anti-Muslim incidents prior to Donald Trump’s stunning rise in last year’s presidential primaries and November election victory, it said the acceleration in bias incidents was due in part to Trump’s focus on militant Islamist groups and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

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Posted on May 9, 2017

By Jon Marcus/The Hechinger Report

Far more low-income students are qualified to attend the nation’s most selective colleges and universities than they enroll, despite the fact that most have budget surpluses they could use to subsidize the neediest applicants, a new study contends.
Most low-income students end up at community colleges and regional public universities with low graduation rates. But some 86,000 annually score on standardized admission tests as well as or better than the students who enroll at the most selective universities and colleges, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce says.
The study contradicts the idea that low-income students aren’t qualified for top schools.

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Posted on May 8, 2017