By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

The New York Times came under fire on Wednesday for running what critics characterized as “uncontested propaganda” in the form of an Op-Ed by notorious war profiteer and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
As in his other prominent op-eds that ran recently in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, Prince – the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – pitched his plan to largely privatize the 16-year war in Afghanistan. Many have denounced this for-profit scheme – which would place the war in the hands of an American “viceroy” and private mercenaries – as tantamount to “colonialism.”
On Wednesday, though, commentators directed their ire at the outlet that “uncritically” provided a platform for Prince’s “advertorial.”

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Posted on August 31, 2017

By Katharine Hayhoe/The Conversation

ExxonMobil’s deliberate attempts to sow doubt on the reality and urgency of climate change and their donations to front groups to disseminate false information about climate change have been public knowledge for a long time, now.
Investigative reports in 2015 revealed that Exxon had its own scientists doing climate modeling as far back as the 1970s – science and modeling that was not only accurate, but that was being used to plan for the company’s future.

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Posted on August 30, 2017

By Andrea Germanos/Common Dreams

In a time of increased efforts to restrict access to the polls, Illinois took a step in the opposite direction, becoming on Monday the 10th state to enact automatic voter registration (AVR).
This “is a huge leap forward,” said Jonathan Brater, counsel with the Brennan Center’s Democracy program. “This groundbreaking accomplishment, brought about by the persistence of civic groups, election officials, and legislators, means a quarter of Americans now live in a state where AVR has been approved. We hope other states will follow suit.”

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Posted on August 29, 2017

By Jon Marcus/The Hechinger Report

Victim of a years-long state budget impasse, Northern Illinois University has a $35 million funding shortfall. It has laid off 30 employees, left 120 other jobs unfilled and postponed building and renovation projects.
There are potholes in the roads and parking lots. Students say the dorms leak. Then again, there are fewer students to complain. Freshman enrollment plummeted by 20 percent last year. Those who are left have seen their fees and other charges rise by $15 million. The university’s credit was downgraded in June to junk status by the Moody’s bond-rating agency.
It was against this backdrop that the president, Douglas Baker, was declared by state investigators to have mismanaged the public institution by sidestepping competitive bidding rules to hire consultants who were paid more than $1 million. One charged $250 an hour.
Within two weeks of that report’s release, Baker resigned – and, in a closed-door meeting of the university’s board of trustees, was given $587,500 in severance pay, plus up to $30,000 to cover his legal fees. He’s also due a previously unreported $83,287 for unused vacation time, the university acknowledged. That’s a total of $700,787.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” said Illinois state Sen. Tom Cullerton (D-Villa Park), vice chair of the committee that oversees higher education.

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Posted on August 28, 2017

By Raymond Hogler/The Conversation

Most Americans with jobs work “at-will:” Employers owe their employees nothing in the relationship and vice versa. Either party may terminate the arrangement at any time for a good or bad reason or none at all.
In keeping with that no-strings-attached spirit, employees may move on as they see fit – unless they happen to be among the nearly one in five workers bound by a contract that explicitly forbids getting hired by a competitor.
These “noncompete clauses” may make sense for CEOs and other top executives who possess trade secrets but seem nonsensical when they are applied to low-wage workers such as draftsmen in the construction industry.
As a scholar of employment law and policy, I have many concerns about noncompete clauses – such as how they tend to make the relationship between workers and bosses too lopsided; suppress wages; and discourage labor market mobility.

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Posted on August 25, 2017

By Jon Marcus/The Hechinger Report

PITTSBURGH – Monet Spencer remembers traveling to affluent suburban high schools when she was a member of the marching band at Brashear High School in this city’s low-income, high-crime Beechview neighborhood.
The suburban band members’ uniforms were brand new, Spencer noticed – not passed down and worn out like hers. So were their instruments, unlike the scratched and tarnished castoffs her school loaned her and her bandmates, including the secondhand flute she played.
The experience sticks in her mind as a symbol of the gulf between the opportunities she had compared to those enjoyed by students living in the suburbs just a few miles away.
“Everyone knows they’re treated differently,” said the soft-spoken Spencer, 19, who was left homeless when her mother died but continued taking herself to school and is now entering her sophomore year in college.
Here’s the latest, more profound way in which wealthier students have an advantage over lower-income ones: Those enrolled in private and suburban public high schools are being awarded higher grades – critical in the competition for college admission – than their urban public school counterparts with no less talent or potential, new research shows.
It’s not that those students have been getting smarter. Even as their grades were rising, their scores on the SAT college entrance exam went down, not up. Nor are those in some schools more intelligent than those in others.
It’s that grade inflation is accelerating in the schools attended by higher-income Americans, who are also much more likely to be white, the research, by the College Board, found. This widens their lead in life over students in urban public schools, who are generally racial and ethnic minorities and from families that are far less well-off.

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Posted on August 22, 2017

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

A government intelligence report obtained by Foreign Policy shows that federal law enforcement agencies expressed concern earlier this year about the domestic threat white supremacist groups posed and would continue to pose.
While President Donald Trump spent much of his campaign and the first six months of his presidency warning Americans about the dangers posed by immigrants from Central America, refugees from majority-Muslim countries, and the street gang MS-13, the joint intelligence bulletin compiled by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security notes that members of white supremacist groups were “responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016, more than any other domestic extremist movement.”
According to the two agencies, “racial minorities have been the primary victims of [white supremacist] violence. The second most common victims were other Caucasians . . . and other white supremacists perceived as disloyal to the white supremacist extremism [WSE] movement.”

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Posted on August 21, 2017

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

More than 200 Durham, North Carolina residents stood outside a jail on Thursday, attempting to turn themselves in for the removal of the city’s Confederate Soldiers Monument to protest the arrests of eight people who have been accused of dismantling the monument. The group chanted, “Thank you, we love you,” in support of those who were arrested.
Takiyah Thompson was detained Tuesday evening after climbing the statue to knock it down, and faces both felony and misdemeanor charges for disorderly conduct, damage to property, and inciting a riot. Four other activists were arrested on Wednesday as well, followed by three who turned themselves in on warrants.
The statue was toppled days after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which neo-Nazis gathered under the pretense of protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. A coalition of racist groups carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!” on Friday night while a man identified as a neo-Nazi was accused of driving a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.
Many who supported the counter-protesters questioned the arrests of Thompson and the other activists on Wednesday, while no arrests had been made in the case of a group of suspected white supremacists who severely beat a black man, Deandre Harris, in Charlottesville on Saturday.
Most of the people in Durham who lined up to turn themselves in were doing so symbolically and in solidarity with those who had taken the statue down, according to a report in the News & Observer. Police declined to allow people into the detention facility unless warrants had been issued for their arrests.

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Posted on August 18, 2017

By A.C. Thompson, Robert Faturechi and Karim Hajj/ProPublica

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – There was nothing haphazard about the violence that erupted in this bucolic town in Virginia’s heartland.
At about 10 a.m. on Saturday, at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counterprotesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot.
On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon.
One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades – and did nothing.

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Posted on August 16, 2017

By Arie Perliger/The Conversation

This piece was originally published on May 28 at The Conversation.
The murder in College Park, Maryland of Richard Collins III, an African-American student who had recently been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was days away from his graduation from Bowie State University, underscores the violence of America’s far-right wing. Sean Urbanski, the University of Maryland student who allegedly stabbed Collins to death, belongs to a racist Facebook group called Alt-Reich: Nation.
It makes sense that the FBI is helping the police investigate this incident as a suspected hate crime. But my 15 years experience of studying violent extremism in Western societies has taught me that dealing effectively with far-right violence requires something more: treating its manifestations as domestic terrorism.

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Posted on August 15, 2017