By Danny Dorling/The Conversation

The UK suffers from the highest levels of income inequality in Europe – partly because of the delusions of its rich. In countries where the rich have less, they tend to be less delusional, about themselves, about other people, about what is possible, and about why some become rich.
In the UK, it is unsurprising to read that an investment banker thinks £100m is a lot of money but “not a ridiculous amount of money.” In a report in the Guardian this week, we also heard that one particular banker is “fairly confident” that a driven and passionate individual could “start from zero and get to £100m within 20 years.”

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Posted on May 5, 2017

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

In a decision with wide-ranging implications for prisoners across Illinois, a federal judge ruled Monday that long-standing problems with the medical and dental care provided in Illinois’s state prisons must be addressed systemically, rather than relying on individual challenges from prisoners.
U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Alonso has held that the lawsuit Lippert v. Baldwin can move forward as a class action. The decision comes after a panel of healthcare experts found the system of providing health care for the more than 45,000 prisoners under IDOC control was woefully lacking, causing needless pain and suffering.

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Posted on May 3, 2017

By Paul Buchheit/Common Dreams

Many wealthy Americans complain about the amount of government subsidies going to the poor. Their complaints demonstrate ignorance, greed or a total lack of fair-mindedness, or a combination of all those symptoms of entitlement at the top.
The Rich Get As Much Of The Safety Net As The Poor
Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have calculated that, on average in 2014, the middle class received more of the safety net than the lower class.
Specifically, the 40% of American adults with incomes just below the top 10% received more in safety net government transfers (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps/SNAP, Veterans’ benefits, etc., but excluding Social Security) than the bottom 50% of Americans.
Even more stunningly according to the same authors, when Medicare and Social Security are both included, the richest 10% on average received approximately as much in government transfers as the poorest 50%.

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Posted on May 2, 2017

By The MacArthur Justice Center

The Chicago Police Department’s sharing of its so-called “Gang Database” with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) triggered a nightmarish chain of events that left Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez imprisoned, in severe physical pain and mental anguish, and fighting deportation, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed on Monday.
Catalan-Ramirez is a devoted father and a mechanic who has never belonged to a Chicago street gang. Despite this fact, CPD mistakenly labeled him as a gang member and conveyed this false information to ICE. ICE relied on this erroneous information during one of its March 2017 “Gang Ops” during which ICE targeted community members who have alleged gang ties.

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Posted on May 1, 2017

By Nandita Bose/Reuters

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s chief executive officer received a 13 percent increase in total compensation to $22.4 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday, as sales growth at the world’s largest retailer remained robust.
CEO Doug McMillon’s compensation, which included cash and stock, compared with $19.8 million the previous year, according to the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
McMillon took over the top job at Wal-Mart in February 2014.

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Posted on April 21, 2017

By James Martin and Stephen Bright/The Conversation

The announcement earlier this month of the largest seizure of methamphetamine in Australian history has been accompanied by a familiar chorus of uncritical and often sensationalized media reporting.
The “street value” of the 903 kilograms of the seized drug was estimated at nearly A$900 million.
But are the claims government authorities make about drug seizures accurate?

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Posted on April 18, 2017

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

School children are being spied on by tech companies through devices and software used in classrooms that often collect and store kids’ names, birth dates, browsing histories, location data, and much more – often without adequate privacy protections or the awareness and consent of parents.
“Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy” shows that state and federal law, as well as industry self-regulation, has failed to keep up with a growing educational technology industry.
At the same time, schools are eager to incorporate technology in the classroom to engage students and assist teachers, but may unwittingly help tech companies surveil and track students.
Ultimately, students and their data are caught in the middle without sufficient privacy protections.

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Posted on April 14, 2017

By The Illinois PIRG Education Fund

Medical debt collectors often employ aggressive tactics and attempts to collect debt from the wrong customers – putting consumers’ credit records at risk. Medical debt accounts for more than half of all collection items that appear on consumer credit reports. Recognizing medical debt is both often mistaken and not a good indicator of future creditworthiness, leading credit score companies have begun to remove it from credit scores, but it still appears in credit reports.
Those are the findings of the ninth in a series of reports by the Illinois PIRG Education Fund reviewing complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The latest report explores consumer complaints about medical debt, a major source of problems for consumers, since medical debt items on credit reports are often wrong or about the wrong consumer.

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Posted on April 12, 2017

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Poor and working-class whites have been getting more attention than resources lately – just like black folk have for generations.
The time couldn’t be better to push an equity agenda.
“My fellow chiefs and I are making equity a priority of our work,” said South Dakota Secretary of Education Melody Schopp in her address last month to a national convening of the CCSSO. The Council of Chief State School Officers is a membership organization comprised of the top education leaders of each state.
The think tank Aspen Institute and CCSSO published “Leading for Equity: Opportunities for State Education Chiefs,” a paper that outlines 10 commitments by state education officials to improve equity. And states have the ability to act. As school superintendents implement the complex new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, they have the freedom that ESSA provides to promote equity in their state.

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Posted on April 11, 2017

By ProPublica

Earlier this week, we published an investigation with Consumer Reports in which we found that many minority neighborhoods pay higher car insurance premiums than white areas with the same risk.
Our findings were based on analysis of insurance premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri.
We found insurers such as Allstate, Geico and Liberty Mutual were charging premiums that were as much as 30 percent higher in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in whiter neighborhoods with similar accident costs. (Here are details on how we did the analysis.)
An industry trade group, the Insurance Information Institute, responded in the Insurance Journal.
The piece, by James Lynch, vice president of research and information services, calls our article “inaccurate, unfair, and irresponsible.”
We disagree. As we typically do with our reporting, we contacted the industry well ahead of publication and gave it an opportunity to review our data and methodology and respond to our findings.
Here is the response we and Consumer Reports sent to the Insurance Journal:

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Posted on April 10, 2017