By The Roderick And Solange MacArthur Justice Center

Attorneys representing the coalition that petitioned for the appointment of a special prosecutor to take over the prosecution of Chicago Police Officer Jason D. Van Dyke released the following statement in reaction to the selection of Kane County State’s Attorney Joseph McMahon:

Given the high number of qualified attorneys in Cook County who have the experience, resources and who are fully independent from law enforcement we’re surprised and disappointed that all of them have been passed over in favor of the Kane County state’s attorney and his team, which includes a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney.
This appointment made by Judge Gaughan stands in stark contrast to the appointment last week of former judge Patricia Brown Holmes as a special prosecutor to investigate whether there was a cover-up by other police officers at the scene of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Cook County Judge LeRoy Martin Jr., chief of the criminal court, selected Holmes, an African-American with extensive experience in Cook County and a reputation for fairness and commitment to discovering the truth.
Judge Gaughan could have chosen Judge Holmes for this assignment, or he could have selected someone with similar understanding of Chicago and its most affected communities.

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Posted on August 5, 2016

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

A recent New York Times editorial – accompanied by the catchy headline, “At McDonald’s, Fat Profits But Lean Wages” – noted precisely what its title implies: That a company posting large profits is still failing to pay its workers a livable wage.
This, of course, is nothing new: In fact, Fight for $15 began, as the movement’s website notes, “with just a few hundred fast food workers in New York City, striking for $15 an hour and union rights.”
The movement has since become a nationwide force, pressuring state governments, along with the federal government, to contend with wage inequality that, as the Economic Policy Institute reported earlier this year, has been steadily rising for over 35 years.
The Times begins its editorial by noting that [Chicago-based] McDonald’s “has reported a 35 percent increase in profits for the first quarter of 2016, an unexpectedly large gain driven in part by its recent decision to sell Egg McMuffins all day long.”
This is great news for “executives and shareholders,” the piece observes, but “when, if ever, will it be good news for McDonald’s employees and for taxpayers?”
We see it over and over again: ‘Taxpayers step in to provide the benefits and survival necessities that are not provided by employers, which then allows companies like McDonald’s to post higher profits and pay their executives lavish salaries.’ (Photo: Mike Mozart/flickr/cc)

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Posted on August 2, 2016

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

Since the 1970s, the American left has been on the defensive.
Facing both an increasingly ambitious business offensive against the core tenets of the New Deal and a Democratic Party establishment that was slowly beginning its rightward shift, progressive activists were pushed out of the mainstream, where they had remained a solid force during the Roosevelt era and through the 1960s.
These consequential shifts were, in large part, due to the changing composition of the Democratic Party’s donor base – a base that moved away from union halls and into the lucrative embrace of corporate America.

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Posted on July 29, 2016

By Nadia Prupis/Common Dreams

The Democratic National Committee tried to hide the fact that Hillary Clinton’s campaign allegedly benefited from a controversial joint fundraising project her team claimed was helping down-ticket candidates, according to leaked e-mails.
The e-mails, released last week ahead of the Democratic National Convention, are “validating concerns raised by campaign finance watchdogs, state party allies, and Bernie Sanders supporters” about the Hillary Victory Fund, write Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf.
For three months after concerns were raised about the fundraising venture, officials at the DNC and on Clinton’s team were publicly defending the scheme, but privately working to shut down “questions raised by reporters, as well as Sanders’ since-aborted campaign, about the distribution of the money.”

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Posted on July 28, 2016

By Emmanuel Felton/The Hechinger Report

PHILADELPHIA – Are you better off now than you were eight years ago? For the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, the answer to this election question has to be a resounding ‘No.’
Over the last decade-and-a-half, the union – which represents the city’s public school teachers, nurses, counselors and support staff – has been nearly halved, its ranks shrinking from 21,000 to 11,000. Come election time, that means 10,000 fewer members to go door-to-door campaigning; 10,000 fewer people paying union dues to finance political ads and get-out-the-vote efforts.
While teachers unions have long played a key role in getting Democrats across the country into political office, the PFT’s decline is the result of bipartisan policies.

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Posted on July 27, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

Potential wealthy donors to the Democratic National Committee were courted with promises of access to the president, a Washington Post analysis of internal DNC e-mails released by WikiLeaks has found. The party insiders’ pitches appear to be in violation of White House policy, the newspaper notes.
On Monday, the Post reported:
“The DNC e-mails show how the party has tried to leverage its greatest weapon – the president – as it entices wealthy backers to bankroll the convention and other needs. At times, DNC staffers used language in their pitches to donors that went beyond what lawyers said was permissible under a White House policy designed to prevent any perception that special interests have access to the president.
“Top aides also get involved in wooing contributors, according to the e-mails. White House political director David Simas, for instance, met in May with a half-dozen top party financiers in Chicago, including Fred Eychaner, one of the top Democratic donors in the country, the documents show.”
On at least one occasion, a White House lawyer asked DNC employees to alter the language of an invitation to a high-dollar event so it would not appear to be soliciting donations in exchange for access to President Barack Obama – demonstrating that employees were made aware of the policy.
“Let’s remove the word round table on page 2 at the top (‘$33,400 – Round table discussion guest’). As you know, WH policy restricts the use of language that gives the appearance that contributors can pay for policy access to the President,” Ruthzee Louijeune, an associate at Perkins Coie LLC, wrote to a DNC staffer in reference to a May event featuring Obama.

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Posted on July 26, 2016

By ProPublica

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act, which was designed to give the public the right to scrutinize the records of government agencies.
Almost no one needs public records more than an organization like ProPublica, whose mission is producing work that “shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.”
Yet almost every reporter on our staff can recite aneurysm-inducing tales of protracted jousting with the public records offices of government agencies.
Local, state and federal agencies alike routinely blow through deadlines laid out in law or bend them to ludicrous degrees, stretching out even the simplest requests for years. And they bank on the media’s depleted resources and ability to legally challenge most denials.
Many government agencies have gutted or understaffed the offices that respond to public records requests. Even when agencies aren’t trying to stymie requests, waits for records now routinely last longer than most journalists can wait – or so long that the information requested is no longer useful. This, in turn, allows public agencies to control scrutiny of their operations.
There’s little reason to hope things will improve. Last week, President Obama, who has repeatedly broken promises to deliver new levels of transparency, signed the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. The act writes the presumption of disclosure clearly into law, pledges to strengthen the FOIA Ombudsman and creates a single FOIA portal for agencies to receive requests, among other user-friendly provisions. But the act explicitly provides no new resources for implementing these provisions.
To provide a sense of the difficulties encountered by ProPublica reporters trying to access public records, we are recounting some of our battles on the Freedom of Information front at all levels of government:

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Posted on July 22, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

Dozens of civilians, including children, were killed on Monday and Tuesday by U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria.
The strikes appeared to have been a mistake, with the civilians taken for Islamic State militants, the U.K.-based human rights group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group told the AFP news agency.
Fifty-six civilians were killed on Tuesday by coalition forces, and 21 civilians were killed by the coalition on Monday. The 77 civilian deaths included at least 11 children.
The BBC reported Tuesday:

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Posted on July 20, 2016

By Lauren Kirchner/ProPublica

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday raised concerns about a risk assessment tool that scores criminal defendants on their likelihood of committing future crimes and is increasingly being used during sentencing.
The court said judges may consider such scores during sentencing, but it said that warnings must be attached to the scores to flag the tool’s “limitations and cautions.” (Read the opinion.)
The court’s ruling cited a recent ProPublica investigation into COMPAS, the popular software tool used to score defendants in Wisconsin and in other jurisdictions across country.
Our analysis found that the software is frequently wrong, and that it is biased against black defendants who did not commit future crimes – falsely labeling them as future criminals at twice the rate as white defendants.

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Posted on July 18, 2016

By Raymond Bonner/Special to ProPublica

“I would be strapped to a board by my arms and legs and by my waist (which was very painful because of my wound.)
Guards with black costumes, masks and black goggles strapped me in. My mouth and nose and eyes were covered by a cloth.
The board – and my body – were placed horizontally. My head was immobilized by a board. Someone poured over the cloth, which entered my mouth and nose. I could hear one water bottle empty out by the gurgling noise it made; I hoped that would end the process, then I heard another bottle start to pour.
Water would enter my lungs. I felt like my whole body was filled with water; even my eyes felt like they were drowning. I experienced the panicked sensation of death and my body convulsed in terror and resistance.
“I thought ‘I will die. I will die.’ I lost control of my functions and urinated on myself. At the last possible moment, I instantly vomited water violently but at the same time was still panicked and desperate for air.”

In 2009, Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers interviewed their client and prepared a handwritten, first-person account of the torture their client suffered at the hands of the U.S. government.

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Posted on July 15, 2016