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FOCUS: Snitches Get Stitches |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 26 June 2017 10:37 |
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Kiriakou writes: "There's no easy solution to the problem of protecting rats. But that's not really the issue, anyway. The issue is that the government shouldn't have to rely on rats to make cases."
John Kiriakou at his Arlington home. (photo: Jeff Elkins)
Snitches Get Stitches
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
26 June 17
 he Wall Street Journal reported last week that federal officials are worried that their rats and snitches are increasingly facing attacks in prison because of the free availability of court documents identifying them as informants. In response, the federal courts are considering ways to make the criminal judicial process more secret, raising concern among defense attorneys and civil liberties activists.
Federal judicial authorities say that in the past three years as many as 700 “witnesses and informants” have been threatened or injured, and 61 have been killed by other prisoners for testifying against or informing on fellow prisoners.
There is, of course, a huge incentive for turning rat. Prosecutors can cut years off an informant’s sentence. Some informants don’t go to prison at all. Others are sent to lower-security prisons for their sentences, or even to minimum-security work camps. Prosecutors, in turn, win 98.2 percent of their cases, according to ProPublica, almost all of which are a result of plea bargains. With rats lined up to testify, the defendant doesn’t have a chance. The dirty little secret of the American court system is that very few defendants ever get to face their accusers in a court of law or be judged by a jury of their peers. It’s a quaint idea, but it never happens.
It’s not hard to figure out if a person has testified against you, even if you’re incarcerated and have no ready access to the internet. Every federal prison in America, by law, has to have a law library. That law library, again by law, has to allow access to LexisNexis court records. But even if the detailed information about informants isn’t in LexisNexis, a prisoner has only to ask somebody on the outside to access PACER, a pay-per-page portal run by the courts, to look at literally every filing from a case. That would include the names of informants, as well as a review of the information the informant provided.
I want to go on record here as saying that I do NOT condone violence against anybody. I do not believe that informants should be targeted for violence or for retribution in any way. But I understand it when that happens. Let me give you a personal example.
When I first went to prison in 2013 after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, my attorneys warned me that the FBI and the Justice Department were likely furious with the (short) 30-month sentence I had received. They had initially sought 45 years in prison, but my knowledge of the CIA’s dirty laundry and my willingness to testify on my own behalf forced the government to go to the negotiating table. The attorneys said the FBI and the Justice Department would do almost anything to charge me with something else using prison informants, and they would then seek to add years to my sentence. They said to trust no one. I was on full alert.
A few weeks later, a prisoner approached me in our housing unit and said, “Hey, John. There’s a new guy here and he wants to meet you. He says he’s the former spokesman for the Taliban in the U.S.” I had vaguely recalled a New Jersey-based
Afghan-American who had worked for the Taliban, and I remembered that he had gotten himself in trouble with a weapons charge. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m not interested.” The mandatory federal minimum for an illegal weapons charge is five years.
I was walking around the prison yard three or four days later when an obviously Afghan man walked toward me with his hand extended to greet me. I immediately put my hands up in the air, assuming, I believe correctly, that prison guards were in the distance to photograph me embracing the FBI’s rat. I told him to buzz off, using language nowhere near that friendly. “Oh, come on, man,” he responded. “We have a lot in common.” “We have nothing in common,” I said, walking away. “Don’t be like that,” he called. I turned around again. “You’re a rat. You’re obviously a rat. Don’t ever speak to me again.” He was “transferred” three or four days later, having been in my prison for only a week. Either he had either been placed there by the FBI to rat on me or he had the shortest federal sentence in the history of the country.
There’s no easy solution to the problem of protecting rats. But that’s not really the issue, anyway. The issue is that the government shouldn’t have to rely on rats to make cases. The government should rely on evidence. Every defendant should have his or her day in court. Every defendant should have a realistic chance of a jury trial, not just a theoretical one. I guarantee you that the vast majority of rats would say literally anything about another prisoner to get their own sentence reduced. That’s their only goal, after all. Where’s the justice in that?
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Trumpcare Isn't About Health. It's a Tax Cut for the 1% |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 26 June 2017 08:33 |
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Reich writes: "The Senate's bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not a healthcare bill. It's a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a dramatic reduction in healthcare funding for approximately 23 million poor, disabled, working and middle-class Americans."
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Trumpcare Isn't About Health. It's a Tax Cut for the 1%
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
26 June 17
If enacted, the bill would be the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich from the middle class and poor in American history
he Senate’s bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not a healthcare bill. It’s a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a dramatic reduction in healthcare funding for approximately 23 million poor, disabled, working and middle-class Americans.
America’s wealthiest taxpayers (earning more than $200,000 a year, $250,000 for couples) would get a tax cut totaling $346bn over 10 years, representing what they save from no longer financing healthcare for lower-income Americans.
That’s not all. The bill would save an additional $400bn on Medicaid, which Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump are intent on shrinking in order to cut even more taxes for the wealthy and for big corporations.
If enacted, it would be the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich from the middle class and poor in American history.
This disgrace is being proposed at a time when the nation’s rich own a higher percentage of the nation’s wealth and receive the highest percent of America’s income since the era of the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century.
Almost all of the transfer is hidden inside a bill that’s supposed to be a kinder and gentler version of its House counterpart, which Trump called “mean, mean, mean.”
Look closely and it’s even meaner.
The Senate bill appears to retain the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for poorer Americans. But starting in 2020, the subsidies would no longer be available for many of the working poor who now receive them, nor for anyone who’s not eligible for Medicaid.
Another illusion: the bill seems to keep the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. But the expansion is phased out, starting in 2021.
The core of the bill – where its biggest savings come from – is a huge reduction in Medicaid, America’s healthcare program for the poor, elderly and disabled.
This, too, is disguised. States would receive an amount of money per Medicaid recipient that appears to grow as healthcare costs rise.
But starting in 2025, the payments would be based on how fast costs rise in the economy as a whole.
Yet medical costs are rising faster than overall costs. They’ll almost surely continue to do so – as America’s elderly population grows, and as new medical devices, technologies, and drugs prolong life. Which means that after 2025, Medicaid coverage will shrink.
The nonpartisan Urban Institute estimates that between 2025 and 2035, about $467bn less will be spent on Medicaid than would be spent than if Medicaid funding were to keep up with the expected rise in medical costs.
The states would have to make up the difference, but many won’t want to or be able to.
One final major deception. Proponents of the bill say it would continue to protect people with preexisting conditions. But the bill allows states to reduce insurance coverage for everyone, including people with preexisting conditions.
So insurance companies could technically “cover” people with preexisting conditions for the cost of, say, their visits to a doctor, but not hospitalization, drugs, or anything else they need.
The Senate bill only seems like a kinder, gentler version of the House repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but over time it would be even crueler.
Will the American public find out? Not if McConnell can help it.
He hasn’t scheduled a single hearing on the bill.
He’s shut out major hospitals, physician groups, consumer advocates and organizations representing millions of patients with heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses.
McConnell thinks he’s found a quiet way not only to repeal the Affordable Care Act but also to unravel Medicaid – and funnel the savings to the rich.
For years, Republicans have been looking for ways to undermine America’s three core social insurance programs – Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. The three constitute the major legacy of the Democrats, of Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. All continue to be immensely popular.
Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is almost part of that legacy. It’s not on quite as solid a footing as the others because it’s still new, and some wrinkles need to be ironed out. But most Americans support it.
Now McConnell believes he can begin to undo the legacy, starting with the Affordable Care Act and, gradually, Medicaid.
But he knows he has to do it in secret if he’s to be successful.
If this shameful bill is enacted, McConnell and Trump – as well as every Republican senator who signs on – will bear the burden of hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, were they not so determined to make rich Americans even richer.
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We Are Losing the Battle Against Police Brutality in America |
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Monday, 26 June 2017 08:31 |
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King writes: "It's hard for me to write this, but we must be honest about our status in the fight against police brutality in America. We are losing."
Philando Castile was a beloved cafeteria worker at an elementary school. (photo: FB)
We Are Losing the Battle Against Police Brutality in America
By Shaun King, New York Daily News
26 June 17
 t's hard for me to write this, but we must be honest about our status in the fight against police brutality in America. We are losing. I have two primary metrics for that conclusion. First, 2017 is on pace to be the deadliest year ever measured for the number of people killed by police in our country. We can never claim to be winning the battle against police brutality if American police are killing more and more people. Period. Secondly, even the most egregious officers, in the most heinous cases of police violence, with the most overwhelming evidence, are still beating the charges against them.
I can get granular about it. I monitor nearly 50 different metrics regarding police brutality and injustice in America. All of them matter — from the introduction of new policies in local police departments, to the election of district attorneys who are willing to aggressively prosecute police. The battle to reduce police violence in America is a complicated one. But at the end of the day, if more people are being killed by police this year than any other year and the most rotten apples among America's police still aren't being held accountable, then we are losing.
I am losing. This isn't me pointing the fingers at activists or organizations. I am right in the middle of this fight. I've marched. I've protested. I've organized. I've taught. I've petitioned. I've donated. I've lobbied. I've voted. I've campaigned. I've presented. I've written. I've tweeted. I've Facebooked. I've strategized. I've televised. I've radioed. For three straight years, I've thrown everything I've known to throw at the problem of police brutality in America, and by all measures, the problem is now worse than it was before I did any of those things.
We are losing. We are being outspent, out-organized, and out-maneuvered by an unjust system that is so deeply entrenched and so well fortified with the principles of white supremacy, racism and classism that in spite of all of our collective efforts, injustice marches on. It isn't skipping a beat.
Pregnant black women are being shot and killed by police in front of their children. Young black boys are being shot and killed by police. Charges are being filed here and there, but convictions simply aren't happening. Families and communities are repeatedly being told to stay calm and trust the system, but only a damn fool would trust this system. It is fundamentally and categorically unfair.
I can't speak for the thousands and thousands of cases of police brutality in America, but the officer who repeatedly shot Walter Scott in the back should've been convicted. The officer who shot and killed Philando Castile should've been convicted. The officer who shot and killed Rekia Boyd should've been convicted. The officer who shot and killed Terence Crutcher should've been convicted. I could add at least 100 more names to that list just off the top of my head. Every single one of these officers was set free. Why would their fellow officers across the country think it would be any different for them? The odds of an officer being convicted for murder in a police shooting is approaching lottery ticket levels. It's that bad.
I did not say all of this to lament or wallow in self-pity — never that. I said all of that to say that we need a change of direction. I wouldn't even go so far as to say that anything we've done is wrong. We should protest. We should petition and march and vote. We should do all of those things, but they just aren't enough to make a systemic shift in the problem. Maybe if we weren't doing all of those things the problem would've spiraled even farther out of control — we'll never know — but what I do know if that families who deserve justice don't have it and the threat of police brutality is more problematic than ever.
On Thursday, I'm going to begin a new five-part series on the immediate pivots and changes I believe we must make moving forward. Last year, I wrote a series on the 25 policy shifts that would drastically reduce police violence in America. Those shifts are still as necessary as ever, but this short new series is less about policy and more about strategy. All I know is that I refuse to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.
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How to Fix Gerrymandering |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45348"><span class="small">Jordan Ellenberg, Slate</span></a>
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Sunday, 25 June 2017 12:51 |
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Ellenberg writes: "The maps in my home state were engineered with merciless precision to ensure a lasting Republican majority in a place whose recent voting practices have oscillated within a narrow purple band. This is surely unfair; the courts will decide whether it's unconstitutional as well."
Voters cast their ballot in the national election at Cannon Pavilion on Nov. 8, 2016 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (image: Darren Hauck/Getty Images)
How to Fix Gerrymandering
By Jordan Ellenberg, Slate
25 June 17
his week, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case of Gill v. Whitford, whose plaintiffs claim the electoral boundaries drawn up by the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature constitute a gerrymander so extreme as to deny them their full ability to vote. The maps in my home state were engineered with merciless precision to ensure a lasting Republican majority in a place whose recent voting practices have oscillated within a narrow purple band. This is surely unfair; the courts will decide whether it’s unconstitutional as well.
It won’t be easy. Redistricting is an unholy snarl of law, politics, and math, and there’s probably no single person who understands it from top to bottom. (But some of us are trying: A group of researchers at Tufts University is organizing a series of conferences in which citizens and scientists are hashing some of these issues out; I’m hosting one in Madison, Wisconsin, in October.)
Here’s one reason redistricting is such a difficult problem. In Wisconsin, two of the major population centers, Madison and Milwaukee, are dominated by Democrats, while only one (centered on, yes, crucial Waukesha County) is similarly Republican-heavy. The rest of the state is more moderate but leans mildly Republican overall. It’s not totally crazy, then, for a legislative map to consist of a few heavily Democratic districts in the big cities and many slightly Republican ones elsewhere. Such a map wouldn’t necessarily be evidence of biased, partisan gerrymandering—in some measure, it’s just a consequence of the state’s geography.
Wisconsin claims its map is just such an organic, free-range gerrymander. University of Michigan political scientist Jowei Chen sees it differently. Chen generated 200 random maps algorithmically, using party-neutral methods. Not one of them was as GOP-friendly as the one Wisconsin is using—not even close.
In the computer-generated maps, the number of districts that supported Romney over Obama in 2012 ranged from 38 to 47 out of 99. (Obama got 52.8 percent of the vote statewide, while his Republican challenger got 45.9 percent.) In the actual Wisconsin map, however, 56 of the 99 districts contain a Romney-backing majority. The GOP-drawn map also scores badly on traditional measures of quality. Every computer-generated map kept at least 18 counties entirely within a single district, and some preserved as many as 24. Wisconsin’s map leaves only 14 counties intact.
While we’re not about to give over our districting process to Professor Chen’s laptop, the auto-generated maps serve as a useful benchmark for human-made districts. This figure from Chen’s paper shows just how much of an outlier Wisconsin’s current map really is.
Is there a way to solve the problem of gerrymandering without getting the courts involved? I think there is, and it’s pretty simple: We ought to have a lot more state legislators.
State legislatures are like the restaurant dinner in the old joke—awful, and the portions are much too small. The Wisconsin Assembly has 99 members, each representing around 60,000 people. That’s just two more legislators than we had in 1860, when the state’s population was about an eighth as large. While most states have big districts like Wisconsin’s, there are exceptions. West Virginia, a third of Wisconsin’s size, has 100 members in its lower house. North Dakota has 94 representatives for a population a little bigger than Milwaukee’s. And New Hampshire, the champ of them all, has a House of Representatives with 400 members, each one representing just more than 3,000 people.
Why would bigger legislatures blunt the power of gerrymandering? Chen has a paper about this, too. Think about the extremes. If Wisconsin had the maximal possible number of legislative districts—namely, one for each Wisconsinite—the partisan composition of We-the-Legislature would, by definition, match the partisan composition of the state. Gerrymandering would be impossible. At the other extreme, what if there was only one district, comprising the whole state? In a swing state like Wisconsin, legislative control would be up for grabs. In a reliably Democratic or Republican state, the opposition party would have zero representation in the legislature, probably forever—the ultimate gerrymander.
If the largest possible districts yield the strongest gerrymandering and the smallest possible ones allow for no gerrymandering at all, you might guess that making districts smaller makes gerrymandering harder. Chen’s data suggests that, in swing states at least, this guess is right: States with more legislators per capita, like Minnesota, display less evidence of gerrymandering than big-district states like Michigan.
Smaller legislative districts would have other healthy effects, too. The average Wisconsin Assembly candidate raised $33,000 in campaign money in 2014—sofa-cushion change by federal election standards but enough to deter many potential candidates without rich-person connections. If our state legislature had 300 assembly reps instead of 99, every town of 20,000 could have its own legislator. An ordinary person with some standing in the community would have a real chance, and, if she won, that ordinary person could spend her two-year term legislating instead of frantically scrabbling for re-election funds. If more people have the chance to vote for someone who lives in their own town, you’d expect higher turnout, too.
Enlarging state legislatures obviously wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem of gerrymandering U.S. congressional seats (though lots of people think the House of Representatives, too, should be a lot larger). There are also real obstacles even if we do stick to the state level. In some states, Wisconsin among them, increasing the size of the legislature would require amending the state constitution. Incumbent legislators also have an obvious disincentive to dilute their own power by crowding the chamber. Not least, a 300-person Wisconsin Assembly would be expensive and complicated to run.
And what about the big states? To have one representative for each 3,000 Californians, the legislature would need 13,000 members. Guess what—there are people who think that’s not insane! John Cox, a San Diego businessman and conservative gubernatorial candidate, is pushing a statewide ballot measure to create an 8,000-member assembly. Each of the 80 current districts would have 100 representatives, who would select one of their number to go to Sacramento and be a full-time legislator. But all bills would be voted on by all 8,000 representatives. And if the group of 100 soured on their chosen captain, they could call for a recall at any time by majority vote. There are probably a million reasons this California plan is a lousy idea, but the scientist in me would love to see the experiment carried out.
There’s one more problem with the big-statehouse solution to gerrymandering. Under the current system, the legislature can dilute the electoral power of a college town by, for instance, pasting on an adjacent chunk of mining country that’s just large enough to give the district a Republican lean. Let’s say you break the college town off from the miners; that gives you two districts, one Democratic and one Republican, each one rock solid for its party. Keep going, and the original big magenta district becomes a patchwork of red and blue tracts, like a blurry image that resolves into focus as you load it.
Gerrymandering requires competitive districts; you pack the opposition voters into a few districts where they have a supermajority, leaving yourself a small edge in the ones that remain. What Chen finds is that bigger legislatures protect against gerrymandering precisely because smaller districts are more homogeneous, and thus more likely to be uncompetitive. As civic-minded people, we want lots of vigorously contested elections, district maps that don’t rig the game in favor of one party, and elections carried out without the constant intervention of the courts. We might have to settle for two out of three.
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