By The U.S. Public Interest Research Group

Monday’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice of a proposed $20.8 billion out-of-court settlement with BP to resolve charges related to the Gulf Oil spill allows the corporation to write off $15.3 billion of the total payment as an ordinary cost of doing business tax deduction.
The majority of the settlement is comprised of tax deductible natural resource damages payments, restoration, and reimbursement to government, with just $5.5 billion explicitly labeled a non-tax-deductible Clean Water Act penalty.
This proposed settlement would allow BP to claim $5.35 billion as a tax windfall, significantly decreasing the public value of the agreement, and nearly offsetting the cost of the non-deductible penalty.

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Posted on October 6, 2015

Another Beachwood Thought Experiment

* The head of the CTA one day would be the head of CPS the next . . .
* Zoo Day: Animals released into city streets to get residents to relax.
* We’d not only have an elected school board, Chris Coghlan would be on it.
* Aldermen required to wear onesies to city council meetings.

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Posted on October 6, 2015

By Alec MacGillis/ProPublica

This story was co-published with The New York Times’ Room for Debate. Read the full discussion here.
No sooner had the toll from the latest mass shooting been tallied than came the world-weary predictions that the carnage would have zero political effect. “Why the Gun Debate Won’t Change After the Oregon Shooting,” read truly grassroots network of committed and well-organized supporters who are willing to make calls to legislators and turn out in even low-turnout elections to back pro-gun candidates. This “intensity gap” bedevils gun-control groups, which, however well some of their proposals poll, have trouble getting voters to agitate and to prioritize the gun issue the way that gun-rights defenders do.
But the invincibility of the gun lobby is being overstated.

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Posted on October 5, 2015

By Lois Beckett/ProPublica

This story was last updated on June 18, 2015.
After mass shootings, like the ones these past weeks in Las Vegas, Seattle and Santa Barbara, the national conversation often focuses on mental illness. So what do we actually know about the connections between mental illness, mass shootings and gun violence overall?
To separate the facts from the media hype, we talked to Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, and one of the leading researchers on mental health and violence. Swanson talked about the dangers of passing laws in the wake of tragedy – and which new violence-prevention strategies might actually work.
Here is a condensed version of our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

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Posted on October 4, 2015

By Alec MacGillis/ProPublica

This story was co-published with The Daily Beast.
There was plenty in the complex deal to benefit bankers, lawyers, executives and hedge fund managers. Patriot Coal Corp. was bankrupt, but its mines would be auctioned to pay off mounting debts while financial engineering would generate enough cash to cover the cost of the proceedings.
When the plan was filed in U.S. bankruptcy court in Richmond last week, however, one group didn’t come out so well: 208 retired miners, wives and widows in southern Indiana who have no direct connection to Patriot Coal. Millions of dollars earmarked for their health care as they age would effectively be diverted instead to legal fees and other bills from the bankruptcy.

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Posted on October 2, 2015

New Twist On Classic Album

“On September 29, Roger Waters The Wall premiered in nearly 3,000 theaters around the world. The film puts a new twist on Pink Floyd’s revolutionary concept album The Wall, released in 1979.
“Waters sat down with RT correspondent Anya Parampil to discuss the new project, and to air his views on power and the media.
“He also talks about his activism surrounding justice in Palestine, BDS of Israel, and Guantanamo Bay, particularly the release of Shaker Aamer. Waters finally asks: Why are we killing the children?”

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Posted on October 1, 2015

Narrated By Kim Holmes, Produced By Greg Boozell

“We Were Not Ladies. We Were Women tells the story of 1930s labor leader Agnes Burns Wieck and her role in the Illinois Mine War.
“The 1930’s was a tumultuous time for workers and Illinois was no exception. Illinois miners were deeply divided in a bloody conflict which lasted for years, later to be known as the Illinois Mine War. Instigated by John L. Lewis, the controversial president of the United Mine Workers of America, the mine war involved rival unions, coal companies, the state militia, and even former Governor Henry Horner.
“Through her leadership, Agnes Burns Wieck forged a new role for women in the labor movement and confronted John L. Lewis face-to-face to challenge the violence in the Illinois coal fields.
“The documentary features interviews with historians, first-person accounts, and reenacted performances to tell Agnes’ remarkable story.”

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Posted on September 28, 2015

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Thursday launched the Offline project, a campaign devoted to digital heroes – coders, bloggers, and technologists – who have been imprisoned, tortured and even sentenced to death for raising their voices online or building tools that enable and protect free expression on the Internet.
The Offline project initially presents five cases of silenced pioneers, including the personal stories of technologists like Saeed Malekpour, a Canadian programmer who wrote software for uploading photos to the Web.
While visiting Iran, Malekpour was kidnapped, thrown in prison, beaten, tortured and given a death sentence by an Iranian court. His case, and other cases of coders and online journalists imprisoned by governments for their work in the digital world, have received little attention in the mainstream media and online community.

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Posted on September 26, 2015

By Annie Waldman/ProPublica

A new report released Thursday provides a detailed look at the graduation rates of low-income college students. At many colleges, low-income students graduate at much lower rates than their high-income peers.
At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, only 35 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate college, a rate that is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their wealthier peers. And at St. Andrews, a liberal arts college in Laurinburg, North Carolina, only 13 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate, more than 50 percentage points less than students who don’t receive the grants.
The study found 51 percent of Pell students graduate nationwide, compared to 65 percent of non-Pell students. The average gap between wealthy and poor students at the same schools is much smaller: an average of 5.7 percentage points. That’s because many Pell students attend schools with low graduation rates.

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Posted on September 25, 2015

By Richard Valdmanis/Reuters

Casting the fight against climate change as an urgent moral duty, Pope Francis in June urged the world to phase out highly-polluting fossil fuels.
Yet in the heart of U.S. oil country several dioceses and other Catholic institutions are leasing out drilling rights to oil and gas companies to bolster their finances, Reuters has found.
And in one archdiocese – Oklahoma City – Church officials have signed three new oil and gas leases since Francis’s missive on the environment, leasing documents show.
On Francis’s first visit to the United States this week, the business dealings suggest that some leaders of the U.S. Catholic Church are practicing a different approach to the environment than the pontiff is preaching.

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Posted on September 24, 2015