By Lauren McCauley/Common Dreams

Amid the uproar over the Republican Party’s attempt to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics, a little-noticed rule change was passed that guts an essential element of government oversight.
A rules package approved by the House included a sentence that read: “Records created, generated, or received by the congressional office of a Member . . . are exclusively the personal property of the individual Member . . . and such Member . . . has control over such records.”
The change, first pointed out by OpenSecrets.org and reported by the Fiscal Times on Monday, effectively means that some documents are no longer the property of the U.S. government, giving lawmakers the ability to hide critical information from an oversight investigation.

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Posted on January 11, 2017

By Patrick G. Lee/ProPublica

A divisive vote, with jobs and immigrants the most combustible issues. An outcome that surprised the experts. A nation left on edge, with many anxious about intolerance and the violence that can stem from it.
No, not just America today, but also the United Kingdom seven months ago. Last June, voters there opted out of the European Union, ushering in a new prime minister who has since backed controversial proposals, including one that would require pregnant women to show papers that prove their “right” to use the national health system, before being allowed to give birth in a hospital.
So, were the worst fears of racial, ethnic or other hate violence realized? A mix of government agencies, academics and other organizations have been laboring to offer answers.

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Posted on January 10, 2017

By Ebony Slaughter-Johnson/Common Dreams

A little over 80 years ago, NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois wrote “Black Reconstruction in America,” a groundbreaking essay that looked at the racial politics of the post-Civil War years.
The major failure of those years, Du Bois insisted, was that poor whites and poor blacks failed to form an alliance around their mutual economic interests and challenges. Instead, white elites doubled down on their efforts to divide poor people of different races.
“So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro,” Dubois lamented, “a labor movement in the South [was] impossible.” Though similarly exploited by white elites, economically disenfranchised whites and blacks “never came to see their common interest.”

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Posted on January 9, 2017

By Dave Johnson/Common Dreams

Every year you hear a lot about Tax Freedom Day. This is the day the public supposedly has “earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year.”
According to the Tax Freedom Day website: “Americans will collectively spend more on taxes in 2016 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined.”
The trick, of course, is the word “collectively.” As in “Bill Gates walks into a room full of homeless people. Collectively the room owns billions of dollars of wealth.” Non-billionaire Americans don’t pay nearly this much in taxes.
Tax Freedom Day is an anti-government propaganda gimmick where the billionaire class suggests that we stop “working for the government.” It’s a trick: most of us don’t pay that much in taxes and those who do are making so much money they hardly notice it.
Let’s see how this “Tax Freedom Day” formula can be applied to framing America’s retirement crisis.

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Posted on January 7, 2017

By Lauren McCauley/Common Dreams

As many suspected, President-elect Donald Trump’s web of business conflicts is much more complicated than he has let on.
An analysis by the Wall Street Journal published Thursday found that the incoming president owes at least $1.85 billion in debt to as many as 150 Wall Street firms and other financial institutions.
According to the examination of legal and property documents, “Hundreds of millions of dollars of debt attached to Mr. Trump’s properties, some of them backed by Mr. Trump’s personal guarantee, were packaged into securities and sold to investors over the past five years,” thus “broadening the tangle of interests that pose potential conflicts for the incoming president’s administration.”

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Posted on January 6, 2017

By Sarah Smith/ProPublica

Near the start of his second term, President Obama had granted clemency at a lower rate than any president in recent history. He had pardoned 39 people and denied 1,333 requests. He had used his power to commute a prisoner’s sentence just once.
But as he enters the final days of his administration, Obama has dramatically picked up the pace. He’s now issued commutations to 1,176 people since entering office – more than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan combined.
In December, Obama commuted the sentences of 231 people in a single day.

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Posted on January 5, 2017

By Jon Marcus/The Hechinger Report

When a state budget impasse drained money from public universities and colleges in Illinois beginning in 2015, some were forced to lay off hundreds of employees, shorten their semesters, even warn they might shut down. Enrollment plummeted. Credit ratings fell to junk status.
Chicago State University, for instance, which has a student body that is mainly black and Hispanic and drawn from its neighborhood on the city’s South Side, cut 300 workers from its payroll and – its very future in limbo – managed to attract fewer than 100 new freshmen in the fall.
The flagship University of Illinois, far more of whose students are white and wealthier, was not immune from the predicament. But with cash reserves to tap, and an increase in enrollment that brought in more tuition revenue, it has suffered a far less drastic impact from the still-ongoing budget crisis.

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Posted on January 4, 2017

By Lee Kern/The Hechinger Report

Each day as we tune into news sites and social media, we hear disturbing reports of violence in our nation’s schools.
These stories’ regularity leads us to believe schools are no longer safe places for our children, or our teachers.
So, can we curb school violence and the behavior problems behind it? Can we create safe and supportive school environments and reach struggling children and adolescents? The answer is “yes” – but it takes some work.
The first step is understanding the nature of student behavior in schools. Several decades of research reveal a depiction of problem behavior among a school’s student body. In nearly every school studied, the majority of students (about 80 percent) rarely, if ever, exhibit behavior problems (such as code of conduct violations resulting in a disciplinary referral) at school. The majority of students receive no, or only one, disciplinary referral during a school year.

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Posted on January 3, 2017

By Deirdre Fulton/Common Dreams

The federal government is garnishing Social Security checks to recoup unpaid student debt, leaving thousands of retired or disabled Americans below the poverty line and setting the stage for an even bigger problem, according to a new report.
The data from the Government Accountability Office, compiled at the behest of Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), showed that people over the age of 50 are the fastest-growing group with student debt, outpacing younger generations – and compared to younger borrowers, older Americans have “considerably higher rates of default on federal student loans.” This leaves them open to having up to 15 percent of their benefit payment withheld, in what’s called an “offset.”

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Posted on January 2, 2017

By Kate Tummarello/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s been a busy year on a number of fronts as we continue to fight to rein in the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of innocent people.
Since the 2013 leaks by former government contractor Edward Snowden, the secretive and powerful agency has been at the top of mind for those thinking about unconstitutional surveillance of innocent Americans and individuals abroad.
In 2016, the courts, lawmakers and others continued to grapple with questions of how much we know about NSA surveillance.

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Posted on December 31, 2016